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The New Planning System - how it works...
Fred Russell
I have attended many meetings of planning bodies and amenity groups during the past year or so and so far have found no one who could define for me how the present new planning system is supposed to work, not even the planning authorities themselves. The old system had two levels, the County Level Structure Plan and the District Level Local Plan. The two plans were supported, if that is the right word, by the issue of various types of government ‘guidelines’, which were, as the saying goes, intended for the obeyance of fools and the guidance of wise men. It soon became apparent that guidance was interpreted by the planning authorities as law, since it made their job easier to be able to cite (for example) the PPGs (Planning Policy Guidelines) as government ‘requirements‘, which must be obeyed. The interpretation of these guidelines became an art generating its own bureaucracy within the Planning Office hierarchy. It now appears that the government decided that this existing two-tier system was far too complicated (meaning too complicated for laymen like you and me) to comprehend and that a system that had existed successfully for 50 years must be in need a major overhaul. So they overhauled it, but this time they made sure that guidelines became law in fact, and there is little pretence now that the local development is driven by local needs and involvement. The structure is not so much a logical framework as a set of nested relationships and Planning Offices are indulging in a frenzy of paper production to show that they understand what the government wants and will deliver it. Most of the changes will affect the plan-making process itself rather than the operational side of dealing with individual applications. This new system is confusing even for experts and seems designed to place the comprehension of it beyond normal human ken, much as the Mandarin language and governance bureaucracy in ancient China was designed specifically to ensure that the control of China always lay with those with the leisure to learn the language, thus ensuring a self-perpetuating ruling class. The government has been making lots of noises about listening to us. However, in reality we seem to have a system where you and I have a voice in the early stages of the ‘bottom-up’ planning system (e.g. our Taplow Parish Plan), but then it runs into the irresistible force of the 'top-down' plans emerging from an unelected Regional Assembly who have the force of law behind them. It's still too early in the game to see what will happen when these two forces meet in the middle, but it's hard to imagine that local needs will overrule the national or regional needs. Where was I? (Even I'm confused.) Oh yes, trying to explain how this new system works. It's probably best to show the structure as a diagram, so here goes: (Insert Planning Chart) This structure is still very loosely defined and one suspects the local authorities are having to make things up as they go along. What does seem to be clear, however, is that the Planning Authorities have generated a blizzard of paper and bodies that feed this structure. No one seems terribly clear what a Local Strategic Partnership (LSP) consists of, except that we are told by SBDC that unless we are represented on one we are not likely to have much of a voice in the preparation of the LDF (that's the Local Development Framework - please try to keep up). We have formally asked SBDC to be formally involved but the answer so far has been vague, to say the least. What is clear is that there is no formal template for our involvement. Another area that remains unexplained is what opportunities there will be for public participation at regional level. We do know, however, that there will be no right to be heard at public examination of policy. Surprise, surprise! As the RSS (Regional Spatial Strategy) will be a key driver for what ends up in our LDF (Local Development Framework) - which is not allowed to depart from the RSS - it would seem, since our voices cannot be represented, that we are not involved in either a fair or democratic process. The LDF is clearly the crunch point between the local and regional(or national) needs. The LDF consists of three documents: the Statement of Community Involvement, the Action Plan and a Local Policy Plan). These must be revised annually and replaced every three years, so to all practical purposes policy will always be under some form of review. It was my (obviously mistaken) view that policy was a longer-term framework within which to build strategic and tactical actions to give effect to those policies. But it appears that policy can become a plastic thing, changeable according to the latest government thinking. Each part of the LDF can be developed separately but SBDC are required to prepare the SCI before starting the rest of the work. As I understand it, the SCI is supposed to describe HOW local participation is to work; this discovery is important to us since that last time our society's President, Eva Lipman, tried to get a commitment out of the planning authorities to ensure our voice was heard she was told it was still much too early - this in spite of their already having produced a massive document labelled ‘Scoping Report for South Bucks District’ in May of this year... At a recent Chiltern Society meeting to review the South East Plan, it was pointed out that our society needs to be part of the South Bucks LSP (Local Strategic Partnership - you see why I have to keep repeating these acronyms?) I tried to find a global definition of these LSPs but all I came up with is the local variant of it. Here is one example: A local strategic partnership (LSP) is a single body that:- brings together at a local level the different parts of the public sector as well as the private, business, community and voluntary sectors so that different initiatives and services support each other and work together;
- is a non statutory, non-executive organisation;
- operates at a level which enables strategic decisions to be taken and is close enough to individual neighbourhoods to allow actions to be determined at community level;
- should be aligned with local authority boundaries.