Encouraging news from Manchester. The Greater Manchester Combined Authority, comprising nine local councils, came into being on 21 March 2024. Its purpose is to align cross border spatial policies. But it will have no statutory planning powers nor a remit to act as a spatial leader with power to deliver growth policies. The President of the Royal Town Planning Institute whilst commending formation of the GMCA after ten years of attempts has expressed her concerns it will lack of these powers.
This co-ordination body looks like a limp step back to strategic planning. So the thinking which lies behind the initiative is welcome. But as to delivery, there are yawning omissions. Will it address and eventually resolve the reasons why the planning system is broken? Will it address the raw sore: home prices relative to earnings are simply far too high? Will it remove the local spatial barriers that impede prosperity? Will it provide the leadership needed to convince local opponents of local spatial change that there are good reasons to welcome local changes? Above all, will it create spatial visions that ensure local communities pocket development value by introducing locational planning policies that look far beyond 10/20 years ahead: towards a plan on a generational basis? As its remit is only until 2039, it cannot take back this role; one for which the private sector which has spatially failed so badly..In short, will it win local support for change?
Elsewhere, for sometime the West Midlands and Black Country have also tried to create a combined authority without success., And very recently it is interesting to learn that Berkshire’s six unitary councils have decided to create a single body to enhance their local lobbying capacity due to fears the county’s decades long growth trajectory has tailed off in recent times.. In Berkshire’s case is this policy u-turn a reflection of the Conservatives loss of political control of four unitary councils last spring? Will it be enough to promote growth but stop unloved change, if this is not a contradiction!
The plan to triple the size of Cambridge in twenty years is the classic example of half baked strategic thinking. It is the brain-child of the government in power and therefore ought to have real thrust behind it. What is more major growth around Cambridge is aligned with the market. But it too will fail. It is a good idea but needs to be set in a spatial framework and is not. Local support will be absent as the need for Cambridge to act as a host location for national reasons is not explained.. Start by explaining the need for the obvious first step, why we need a national spatial plan.
Instead the government wants to deliver levelling up, whatever it means without a spatial plan.. . It wants to promote economic growth and make homes affordable again. It wants the new infrastructure necessary to go zero carbon like electric power lines. All are sensible objectives. But it is scared to the marrow taking steps to meet these aspirations, believing with good reason they will antagonise large parts of its electoral base when local residents discover what these aims mean for local change near them. No doubt they look at what has happened to their four Conservative councils in Berkshire last year, and draw conclusions. And unfortunately they draw the wrong conclusions. The Liberal Democrats breakthroughs in West Berkshire, Wokingham, and Windsor and Maidenhead and Labour’s in Bracknell Forest makes Conservatives think their electoral eviction is due to their own failures to stop unpopular house building. This a natural response but wrong.,Measured in the narrow context of a knee-jerk reaction they are right to attribute this electoral failure to spatial failure. Looking ahead this isn’t the case. So the new controlling councils who have taken their place will be equally scared of advocating unbridled housing development on the haphazard basis of the last two decades. In reality the new councils too will have to grasp this difficult house building nettle.
And here is the rub. Is there a way to have both? Have growth, new prosperity and not lose local support? Not on your own.is the truth.
The way it can be done is by thinking, planning and communicating on a generational time scale, across council borders and across party divides., To do so, needs cross party and cross borders leadership within the framework of a national spatial plan which is also generational based, not election time scale based, and is supported within Westminster by a cross-party coalition of shared aspirations which has a spatial tangible vision. Working together will prove radical for national politicians accustomed to yah-boo name calling and above all will demand shifts in thinking by our top political leaders. Will any political party in the general election this year have the insight to see the opportunity and respond?
Ian Campbell
1 April 2024
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