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Planning shouldn't make things worse
Planning polices – and ordinary
people – are being ignored for the sake of big buildings,
argues Richard Simpson
TONIGHT (Thursday) councillors will be asked by planning
officers to approve a large redevelopment scheme which does
unnecessary damage to Regent’s Park. It means building
a tower which will further degrade the appearance of the park.
The damage to the historic landscape is entirely avoidable –
it is a matter of deliberate choice by the developers and their
architects. They can say, quite rightly, that they have spent
months in discussion with Camden planners on the scheme, who
are now recommending the development although the tower obviously
conflicts with Camden’s own policies.
Does that ring bells? Aren’t we always hearing about those
Camden planning policies, which come and go like some Cheshire
cat?
Clever and hard-working planning officers spend many years carefully
developing planning policies. Local communities get consulted
on them. They are exhaustively examined by planning inspectors.
A report is then considered through another process of consultation,
with further revisions, further decisions by councillors. After
many years, policies come into force.
Or are they? Doesn’t the policy smile then begin to fade
away?
Because when a planning application is made, clever and hard-working
planning officers spend their time carefully showing why the
policy doesn’t apply to this development, or, at least,
doesn’t apply in the way that it once seemed to apply.
The planning process has begun to sound like the disputes of
medieval philosophers who tried to work out how many angels
could stand on the point of a pin.
And because planning officers alone now decide most planning
applications in Camden, in secret, and without any effective
scrutiny open to the public, that’s that. Even when councillors
are involved they are not allowed freely to listen to their
electors in case such listening prejudices their decision, in
case they hear what their communities want for their own areas.
And what do local people want that is so outrageous that planning
officers will not hear what we say, dare not allow communities
an effective role in our own areas?
Why do we want to maintain a sense of place and locality? Could
it be that a sense of belonging better leads to ‘respect’
than a whole bunch of Asbos? Could it be that the historic environment
creates destinations where people want to shop and do business,
rather than in the character-free shopping centres and business
parks owned by large property developers – and sometimes
by local authorities? Could it be that maintaining local jobs
supports small local businesses rather than global multinationals?
We already see the results of the current planning system. Those
who can afford to leave our cities are doing so, as Lord Rogers
recently showed. Bizarrely, the planners have responsibility
for urban regeneration at the same time that they are leaching
real life from our cities.
The government has begun another process by which it tries to
convince us that it wants local communities to take ownership
of the planning process. But under the present system, this
looks like another attempt to have policies that aren’t
what they seem, which vanish as they might be effective, another,
deliberate, fraud.
The present system has plenty of scope for effective local engagement
with planning – but effective engagement conflicts with
the interests which really drive the planning system.
As local people we pay very large sums of money for a system
which time and again betrays communities and local interests.
Why should it continue like this? Why should we pay to have
this damage inflicted on us? Is it too much to demand a planning
system which is democratic, open to effective public scrutiny,
balanced and fair to all, and one which is predictable, because
agreed policies are effective? Or are we going to go on pretending
that our present system is anything more than an expensive mechanism
for destroying communities?
And smiling as they fade away.
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