Brush with Democracy - another shade

After losing at two appeals and on the fifth application a local site nearby has finally won approval to form a new vehicular access, and, incidentally create yet a further habitation. Which side of the coin do you see? Persistence rewarded or sheer bloody mindedness, contrary to all local wishes, eventually winning out?

The background. The main road out of the village is narrow, only a car and half width, no verges, with hedges or low walls on either side. This section has a blind corner at either end of a some two hundred yard length of road. Towards the further end the road crosses a stream with stone parapets to either side. All typically Somerset. The local residents find this road difficult to drive and even more dangerous to walk or cycle. No forward visibility and nowhere to go to, or make room to pass. The initial application for two houses to one side of this narrow section of lane had many objectors, eventually it was approved on the basis that no vehicular access should be allowed off this narrow section of lane.

So after a further five applications and two appeals the Planners Officer recommends Approval to the forming of a new access off this same narrow section of lane, just before the bridge. Apparently car speed monitoring demonstrated low risk and visibility splay requirement were achievable. I have a smidgen of sympathy for the Planning Officer. If it was refused again and went to Appeal and if at the Appeal the Applicant could now show compliance with those same reasons used to refuse it last time, the Council could incur considerable costs for being unreasonable. All in all a bad decision and the thugs in our society, prepared to defy all to take what they particularly want, win. The initial decision, no road access of this stretch, was the right one.

Local democracy is a fragile thing. It is hard enough to marshal and focus opinion when freshly engaged to resist a bad application. But to have to return to the same subject time and time and time and time again when you thought you had won first time is beyond the possible. People do have lives and cannot keep going back over the same issues with fervent militancy. The trouble is that Planning decisions are not based on the degree of support or objection to any one proposal by the local residents but rely on the wording of obscure Planning Polices and detached objectives. More on that shortly.

If Planning was only just about what the local residents or even surrounding community thought, there would be no development. It would always be in someone's back garden, therefore to be objected to. You just cannot keep placing all developments, objected to by the vocal organised, near to the weak and ineffectual who are not able to organise a protest. Who would welcome a school, factory, fish and chip shop at the end of their garden? Sure there are bound to be lots of ideas where else they might be located so long as not there at the end of my garden. In the simple early days of Planning there were clear well understood objective principles that guided the application process. Certain areas were decreed suitable for certain type of development so long as specific criteria were met. Residents could object but would have to show that these criteria were breached in some way. A lumpen handed fairness to the community in general but not to the individual.

With time the process has become hugely complicated and complex. The vagaries that follow from this complexity allow a high degree of parochialism, with objective rationale being the loser. What we have now are a series of interrelated Policy Statements. Each Policy Statement being a huge cumbersome document, the result of a prolong and intense period of inspection, challenge, appeal, review and approval. Finally some years down the line, the plan is published and for those few weeks when everyone can remember what it was supposed to enshrine, it remains relevant and the working tool.

The District Council publish their Local Plans for each settlement based on the Structural Plans published by the County Council setting the framework for each of its areas and which in turn it to is based on the government's own published planning strategic objectives for the nation and the regions. From bottom up each is fully referential and compliant with the Policies of the next layer up. So well honed words severally checked for compliance with all relating Policies and stripped of vagueness and ambiguity to the point of course that they become meaningless generalities. Reading any Policy statement from one tier or another, there is no way you can see what is meant and intended when it comes to the specifics of planning in your own patch. Their sweep is too broad and general, stepping well aside from the specifics that might give a clue to the usual conflict of interest arising out of any patch of ground. What is worse we get sweeping aspirational design generalisations that apply totally inappropriately or to some nowhere place. Designs in our patch are to be based on guidelines set up for the Exmoor National Park! Chalk and cheese indeed. Now I like some of the chalk I have seen within the National Park but it is an irrelevance when sorting cheese from cheese in our patch.

Reflecting a view from a contrary stance to that expressed in my Brush with Democracy, we end up in the similar position. An over-blown, bloated planning system no longer responding or recognised by the communities on the ground on one hand. On the other intransigent individuals that are belligerently resist the common good when it compromises their own selfish aspirations find the chinks amongst those generalised words to drive in their wedge. As decisions have to founded on those same words, the Planner is left wrong footed and commonsense flies out of the window. A through spring clean is overdue. Get back to simple objectives with Planners working alongside with the community to help the community understand its planning problems and to achieve it's aspirations. Explaining any National or regional strategic requirments for their local patch and winning support. Not perfect, rough and ready, we may even have to wait before another airport, barrage, power station, motorway can be built. In the end only words can win and keep communities united.

Corporate Greed

Since the inception of Planning Law in 1947, a central aim, encompassed by Abercrombie in his first London Plan, was to banish squalid slums and give everyone the right to sunlight and open space to enjoy. We pay the price in multi-layers of heavy-handed bureaucracy to ensure we all benefit Pretty basic stuff but constantly being whittled away.

A large site, previously used by a utility company, on privatisation became surplus to need. The new foreign owner of this, our essential service developed over decades out of tax-payers money, was now to be maximised for the profit of their shareholders. I have no doubt that teams of experts were assembled and charged, (you will get more if you make more), with getting the most possible return out of this redundant land. Encouraged indirectly no doubt by our government who saw loads of lucre rolling into the exchequer when they sold off London Dock's, freed from planning constraints as the bait.

Our local Planning Officers do have to be mindful of the possibility of an Appeal against any unfavourable decision they might make. One important plank in their defence is that they are adhering to government guidelines. So when the government, as central policy, decrees that housing densities are to be increased to reduce the demand for green field take, our local Planner's have little option. A well muscled team can use that government directive to achieve whatever goal they have in mind leaving our local officer with no room to argue. What we end up with in our town is a new built 'sink estate'. 

The one location that is doomed to ever spiral down until even the lowest of the low ask not to be sent there. Such is the certain future for this recently built development. Where developer profit, maximising the greatest number of households on the plot, is made regardless of all future consequences.They have no tie to the future of the development, only in the immediate, now, profit return to their 'foreign' investors. What we end up with is an overbuilt estate, gloomy, dank and sunless with mean spaces, dominated by car provisions and waste storage and tiny patios, (for a 'lucky' few), overlooked, cast in shadow, too small to plant and undesirable to sit out in. What left over public spaces there are, are 'greened' with robust unfriendly deterrent plants. The obligatory 'children's play area' reduced to a token with no room to run, to sit in the sun or enjoy some fresh air. Does that sound like the pre-war slums our planning laws were meant to prevent? Does to me.

Not just mean in layout and mean in usable public space, but also mean in materials and lacking in any imaginative design, detail or quality. 

We have got to this point. The old presumptions that local pride and interest will ensure the quality of local development have been overturned. Now national corporations with interests far removed from the pleasure and enjoyment of local residents, now determine the quality of developments within our own patch.

Now for a final turn of the screw. The government rules that ultimately determine what shall or shall not be built are all city centric. Drawn up by civil servants that have no living experience other than London and its suburbs. Their mind sets do not encompass rural county towns but their rules, endorsed by a parliament focussed on timetables and vote catching, do set the limits. Take Taunton a rural county market town. Low rise with every expectation of still sitting out in the sun and enjoying the quiet of the countryside. Why should that expectation be set aside for all future generations just to meet a city orientated need to save space? Why should our town be forever despoiled to meet some other place needs. Ruined not just for now but for generations forward and lowering the bench mark by which future schemes are to be judged by. We need decisions by local people, judged in the context of their local concerns and needs. Not a National Policy applied  regardless. A high rise development is not suited to Taunton. Flats are not the norm for Taunton and should never be. These are city solutions for city problems. Low rise and gardens are the norms for Taunton.

High-rise does not suit Taunton

No matter the quality, it is the wrong answer

  

Mission statement

Wide ranging ramblings covering food, the political state and planning. Focused on the south-west of England, but not exclusively, with a remit to rant on anything that gets me going.