At last the government has reined in the cowboy lobbyists and allowed urban renewal to trump rural development
The final redraft of last year's cowboy raid by lobbyists on English town and country planning suggests that the Tories have narrowly rescued themselves from becoming not so much the nasty party as the ugly one.
What last summer read like a builders' manifesto has been replaced with proper planning guidance. The new document is a vast relief. It restores the concept, central to planning in overcrowded countries, that urban renewal should come before rural development. It gives back primacy to local planning, which the earlier draft tried to replace in the short-term with an individual permit system, based on a vague definition of "sustainability". The document places due weight on the intrinsic value of ordinary English countryside outside national parks and green belts, which George Osborne and David Cameron seemed to consider expendable. Above all it recognises that civilised societies use certainty in the allocation of land, through an agreed plan, as the best way to resolve conflicts over use. This is what responsible developers also want.
The row over the planning reform has, like that over the NHS, shone light on the bizarre nature of modern British government. No one doubted that English development control has become cumbersome and dilatory and needs reform. The pernickety EU habitats directive was being streamlined. Labour shifted the ratio of greenfield building to urban from 50-50 to 20-80, a major step of resource efficiency. Grand inquiries were being curbed, having got out of hand not through planning but because central government let them.
The lobbyists argued, largely as a slogan, that planning was impeding growth and turning away investment. It was a claim based on anecdote rather than evidence. It appears nowhere in such comparative studies as the World Economic Forum or the Global Competitiveness Report. Osborne's declaration that planning "cost the British British economy £3bn a year" appears to emanate from a defunct Whitehall unit and refers to speculative land banks. Much land in these banks has planning permission and is being held off the market by builders themselves, denying space for some 350,000 houses. In other words developers are the problem, not the solution. To use planning as the killer argument for unpicking half a century of countryside protection is mere prejudice.
Ninety-eight per cent of commercial planning applications in England are allowed and more than 85% of housing ones. Whatever disgruntled Tory donors may whisper in Cameron's ear, anyone driving across the booming East Midlands can hardly complain of lack of development. Warehouses and housing estates loom over every field. The defect in the planning system lay in Labour's abolition of the old county structure plans, leaving developers uncertain and local councils flailing and understaffed.
The builders' lobby customarily seizes on housing shortage to argue for freeing the countryside for construction. But there is no shortage of land – only of land builders can most profitably develop, and that is rural land. British housing is the most lavish in its occupation of countryside anywhere in Europe. Couples who would be in flats elsewhere, have been encouraged to expect houses with gardens and rooms to spare. Even so, had Osborne really wanted to find more housing space he would have abolished stamp duty and taxed under-occupancy with higher council bands. He did neither.
As with the NHS, planning reform has been a lobbyists' sledgehammer aimed at a nut. Two tycoons behind the first draft were prominent Tory donors, Lord Wolfson of Next and Michael Slade of Helical Bar. Slade's Conservative Property Forum charged members £2,500 "to meet ministers". They won the dropping of the clause in the Localism Act that allowed local communities to appeal against building on their doorstep. This reneging on a specific manifesto pledge appears to be the most glaring case of "bought legislation" to date. Developers even sat on the "practitioner advisory group" which wrote almost all of last year's first draft.
A growth-oriented planning system should direct development to Britain's urban areas, where more land lies idle after de-industrialisation than ever in modern times. Housing developments such as Kirkstall Forge outside Leeds show how dramatic such renewal projects can be. True sustainability would require all new building to be near existing infrastructure, populations, utilities and serviced land. This is, of course, what private developers want.
The row over planning has had nothing to do with the structure of the economy. Nor can planning reform ever be a substitute for the cabinet's inability to re-stimulate demand and thus business confidence. The row demonstrates the extraordinary power special interests now have over British government, thanks in part to the corruption built into party financing. Whitehall today is a screaming cacophony of lobbyists for banks, airports, free schools, motorways, railways, hypermarkets, wind turbines and casinos, many tipping money into party funds and all begging for subsidy. Everyone claims to be pro-growth.
English town and country planning has been a rough and ready success for more than half a century. It has assisted growth in allowing big development in the south of England, when a more dirigiste French or German state would have favoured the north and west. What is remarkable is that this has been achieved with much of rural England still looking unspoiled, in contrast to the sprawling subtopias of the Mediterranean or America. When urbanisation is destroying natural beauty on every continent, there is a duty on wealthier societies to protect what has not been destroyed, for all the world one day to enjoy.
The battle to renew urban England, not the fate of the countryside, should have been at the heart of this argument. The outcome should not be decided by the wallets of lobbyists but by the primacy of urban renewal in economic revival. The proof now will be in the eating. Billboards inviting advertisements are sprouting in fields along motorway corridors the length of the land, allowed by local councils guided by last year's draft. They were the first harbingers of a countryside envisaged by metropolitan Tories, seeking strange metropolitan revenge on their shire colleagues by imposing on them the cluttered landscapes of Spain and Ireland. Will the billboards come down? If not, they will march forever across the English countryside, lasting memorials to a coalition that sold its soul to its donors.
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