Comment: The worst misinformation for 30 years
The hotbed of misinformation over the government's planning policy proposals is obscuring their value.
By Tony Baldry MP
There has been a great deal of media coverage in recent weeks regarding the government's planning proposals.
In a nutshell, the government intend to condense the existing 1,000 pages of often confusing and contradictory planning guidance to a succinct 52-page policy document called the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF).
These are hugely sensible proposals and ones which I welcome. Yet in my almost 30 years of being a member of parliament, I cannot recall any previous policy proposals on which there has been so much misinformation.
I was for some four years in the early 1990s a minister in the Department of the Environment with responsibility for planning.
For as long as I can recall, the main concerns of my constituents quite rightly have been that the planning system to date has been completely "top down".
Such entities as "regional spatial strategies" have determined the number of new houses that need to be built at a regional level, and those numbers are then divvied up, county by county. As a result, counties have had no choice as to the numbers they have had to take and simply have had to divide up the imposed numbers between districts. This has meant that at the local-level people, in particular councillors, have had no real effective decision-making powers over housing numbers aside from where within the district they put them.
The government's proposals make a commitment to abolish these regional strategies and the top down imposition of planning targets.
Ministers have also decided to introduce a new regime of neighbourhood planning which is designed to give people locally far more influence in the planning system than is currently possible.
So for example, people living in villages at the present moment have some limited say on planning decisions through the fact that their parish council may be formally consulted. However, anyone living in towns such as Banbury and Bicester in my constituency has absolutely no similar say on the shape of local development such as the location of new shops, offices, schools or the provision of more green space.
Taken together it is clear that the government is committed to decentralising power to local people. Indeed, from my experiences of the present planning guidance very often it can only ever be understood by planning consultants and planning officers. The succinct 52-page NPPF will change this and make the planning process much more accessible to everyone.
The Campaign to Protect Rural England (CPRE) have been outspoken in criticising the government's reforms. This is somewhat surprising to me as I would have thought that CPRE should be greatly welcoming the fact that what the government is doing through their proposals is considerably strengthening the power of local councillors to determine planning applications in their own areas and increasing local accountability.
There are also claims that the NPPF will weaken protection of the green belt. Having grown up in Burnham Beeches, in the heart of the London green belt, I am a great supporter of the green belt concept. Yet it has been my observation over the years as a member of parliament, that whenever any government has come forward with planning reforms, almost always environmental groups have immediately said that any proposed change in planning law is in some way going to weaken green belt protection.
The NPPF clearly protects all those environmental assets that one would expect the government to want to protect, such as the green belt, areas of outstanding natural beauty and sites of special scientific Interest. In addition, the framework ensures measures are put in place to protect wildlife, biodiversity and cultural heritage.
Taken altogether the new proposals will enhance the influence of local people in planning decisions and make the planning system much more accountable to us all. For far too long all we have had is top down direction when what we needed is local decisions.
Tony Baldry has been Conservative MP for Banbury since 1983.
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