Dr Ashok Kumar
Queen's Speech
Thank you for calling me in this debate.
I believe that this was a challenging Queens Speech.
It proves that our Government is not afraid of tackling the big issues.
Issues that cannot be ducked or avoided.
However much that may affect vested or special interests.
Today we are discussing issues relevant to peoples lives, to families, and to the life of the community in which they live.
We are looking at issues affecting housing, local government, transport, planning and the building of strong sustainable. communities.
And I want to concentrate on those parts of the Queens Gracious Speech which relate to the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Bill.
Much of this bill will deal with technical matters.
Changes to the pattern of development plans.
Strengthening the Regional dimension in the planning process.
Changes to the regulations affecting the handling of public inquiries.
And reforms to the system of planning obligations.
But the section I want to speak on, and the section that I believe has to be at the heart of the bill is the section relating to strengthening community involvement.
I want to make some small suggestions for achieving this aim.
Community involvement was highlighted as a key test in the previous Planning Green Paper that said:
"A key test of the planning system is the extent to which the community trusts it.
"Its workings have to be honest and transparent and allow access by people who want to engage in the process of planning the future of their community
"That trust depends not only on the formality or length of the process, but whether it allows the community's influence to be felt"
We have now formalised that aspiration in a dramatic fashion.
For the first time ever a Government has decreed that all planning authorities will have a statutory duty to state a policy of public involvement in the planning process.
This duty and this requirement will have a lot of resonance in those communities where large scale development is underway.
In those areas of the country experiencing new growth.
Such as the Thames Gateway.
And other parts of the South East.
And perhaps more importantly in those communities which will be undergoing fundamental change as part of the housing renewal process.
My own area of Teesside falls fairly and squarely in that latter category.
We all know what housing market failure can mean.
It means empty houses, and communities where problems of anti-social behaviour follow the physical desolation that abandoned housing leads to.
The Government has taken the bold step of saying that it will be facing up to housing market failure in a resolute fashion.
Facing up to problems that are hindering the government drive to see decent homes for all achieved.
In the North East we have seen real money put into programmes to be administered by the new North East Housing Board.
Programmes designed to see the re-birth of new communities and the freedom to choose new forms of decent and affordable homes.
A re-birth that will – in some cases - literally arise from the rubble and ashes of past communities.
Drawing up and implementing new master plans for those estates suffering from the planning and architectural mistakes of the 1950's and 1960's.
And new master plans for those communities made up of the terraced housing of the century before last.
The chap and nasty 'two up two downs' thrown up by nineteenth century mine owners and manufacturers to house the new urban proletariat.
For both historical and social reasons much of the North East is made up of this kind of housing.
And, despite the new building of the last twenty years, much of Teesside's housing is still made up of such stock.
The rate of demolition that is being envisaged is large.
A report commissioned for the Government Office for the North East by the Centre for Urban and Regional Studies at Birmingham University identified the scale of the issue.
They identified that in the North East there are over 200,000 dwellings that could be 'at risk' of clearance due to dilapidation, low demand and decay.
In my own area of Teesside they identified 59,400 such dwellings.
Dwellings concentrated together in specific areas of Teesside and spread across the area of the Tees Valley's five local councils.
Now, I need to stress that these problems are not of the making of the people living in those communities.
Rather, they are caused by huge and seismic changes in the distribution of population and new patterns of social and occupational mobility.
Patterns that affect some communities in a positive way.
But for many communities in a negative way.
People living in those communities face real problems in their day to day lives.
But they are proud of their community.
And often sad at the decay they see around them,
If we are truly to build new communities on the foundations of the old we will have to take those people with us.
It is not enough to rely on the old dictum that the 'man in Whitehall knows best'.
When we are planning for the new Teesside we need to plan for communities that are the result of the conscious choice of the people of that community.
And that lies at the heart of the duty on community involvement that lies in this section of the Bill.
The mistakes of the past were rooted in the fact that planning was seen as a top down bureaucratic exercise.
Although it has to be said that it was often an exercise carried out in a spirit of real desire for change for the better.
But still, I would argue, it was an exercise that was seen as the exclusive preserve of the planner, the architect and the civil servants in Whitehall and the local Town Hall.
People reacted against this elitism.
At that time ordinary people were trying to tell the planners and the politicians that living in the sky in a tower block was not always a sensible or a sustainable policy.
That splitting up old communities and fragmenting them in new estates often many miles away on green field sites, and with few if any services, was not going to be an exercise that would keep neighbourhood solidarity alive.
And that being treated as the passive recipients of state policies is not the best way of encouraging that which we now call 'active citizenship'.
But, Mr Speaker, we have to guard against the new obligations we are introducing being by-passed or minimised.
We need a concept of involvement and participation that goes further than being merely allowed to let a planning committee to know ones views of a project that has already, for the most part, already been pre-determined.
We need to guard against the syndrome of a community revolt that blazes up after someone reads a statutory notice tied to a lamp post or posted on a wall.
A revolt fuelled by a feeling that 'they are the last to know' about something important to their lives.
We need a form of community involvement that will allow communities to shape their own lives and the spatial form of their community.
We need to look at the very basics of the planning process and see how best we can integrate in community feelings and demands to a masterplan from day one.
There are ways of doing this.
I would commend, Mr Speaker, some areas of good practice that we can build on.
There is the work of those planners and architects who have developed community involvement strategies around what are called 'planning for real' exercises carried out with community forums and groups.
Where proposals are thrashed out and debated in an open forum and where people know that they are communicating with agencies of power on an equal footing.
There is the new developing technology of 'Virtual Reality' being applied to the planning process.
A ICT based technology that can allow for inter-activity between developers, planners and community groups.
And which can allow for the virtual image of a possible new development to be projected in such a way that it can show how it may impact on the surrounding community.
And which can be capable of revision on the screen so as to accommodate ideas and suggestions coming directly from the host community.
Above all, Mr Speaker, I would commend the extension of the present 'Planning Aid Service' across the UK, and especially in those area of the country, like mine, which are going to be subject to vast change.
At present Planning Aid is managed by the Royal Town Planning Institute on a voluntary basis.
It allows for planners acting in a voluntary capacity to give advice on third party rights and the merits and de-merits of planning applications to communities and individuals concerned about the impact of such proposals.
Crucially, that advice is given by a planner employed by an authority other than the one covering the local authority area that is the subject of the application.
An approach that guarantees genuinely disinterested and proper information and advice.
The Planning Aid service and ethos was impoliticly endorsed in the Planning Green Paper when it stated;
"Individuals and community groups often feel in need of independent and impartial advice about how to engage properly with the planning process
"They are often people who lack the resources to use planning consultants.
"They want help to develop planning advocacy skills and they need access to better training and planning advisory services.
"We propose to help in this"
Mr Speaker, I believe that Planning Aid must go deeper, if we are to successfully tackle the issues of housing renewal.
I know that my RHF, the member for Streatham, wearing his ministerial hat, recently attended the RTPI's Planning Aid Conference, and I am sure he picked up many useful ideas there.
One of them, I am sure, was to extend the service so that a Planning Aid team could be – to use the phrase that has entered the language since the Iraq conflict – 'embedded' into a community undergoing physical change.
In that community they can act as community advisors and technical assistants at all stages of the renewal process.
From the first draft proposals for clearance, through to the Compulsory Purchase Order stage and onwards to the physical planning of the new community that will be born.
That, I would argue, is planning in the real sense.
Planning which will have at its root, the betterment of the community and all who live in it.
And, bearing in mind that a new community will be set in bricks and mortar for possibly a century or more, a betterment of life for those as yet unborn.
Thank you for allowing me this brief contribution.
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