Iron Angle: Green belt issues always get politicians in a spin
New Local Government Secretary Eric Pickles lost no time in abandoning Labour’s attempts to force local councils to plan for a record number of new housing over the next 16 years.
A little more than three weeks after settling into his new job, Mr Pickles announced he was scrapping “top-down building targets” and freeing local authorities from the notion that the man in Whitehall always knows best.
Good old Eric, you might think. And as a populist measure, the scrapping of regional assemblies and their hated (and little understood) Regional Spatial Strategies, will play very well to the Conservatives’ rural heartlands.
The Local Government Secretary will also have delighted the arbiters of public opinion, the barometers of the man in the Clapham omnibus, otherwise known as news editors of local papers.
The very mention of the dread words Regional Spatial Strategy was guaranteed to result in the glazing over of eyes in scores of red-top newspaper conferences across the country. You’d almost think the last government had chosen such an absurd title deliberately to stop any normal person from taking an interest in planning matters.
The truth is that regional spatial strategies are important planning documents dealing with far more than just housing, although targets for new house building were always likely to dominate the headlines.
If Mr Pickles had said when abolishing regional spatial strategies something along the lines of “there is an acute housing shortage in this country, driving up prices even in the teeth of economic collapse, and I know we really need to build far more homes but for political reasons I’m going to duck the issue”, he would have been on the money.
What he actually did was to present himself as the saviour of the countryside which, he suggested, would have been concreted over were Labour’s housing targets to have prevailed.
To quote the Local Government Secretary directly: “The previous government gave a green light for the destruction of the green belt across the country and we are determined to stop it. We’ve promised to use legislation to scrap top-down building targets that are eating into the green belt.
“It will no longer be possible to concrete over large swathes of the country without any regard to what local people want. From now on communities will be trusted to make the right decisions about what development is suitable for their area, not bossed around by central government and unelected regional quangos.”
Good grief. There’s enough hyperbole here to keep us going for the five years the coalition government thinks it is going to last. Large swathes of the countryside under threat, destruction of the green belt? Well, not really Mr Pickles.
There are two things to say about the 400,000 house-building target for the West Midlands proposed by the last government. The first is that the figure is so overblown that it would only ever be achieved in the fertile imagination of government ministers.
It would have meant increasing the number of dwellings in the region by a fifth – a figure almost twice as high as the housing targets agreed by local councils and the government only six years ago. And with the best will in the world, given the state of the building industry, it is a target with about as much chance of being achieved as England winning the World Cup final 6-0.
The second thing to say about 400,000 new homes is that, even if magically they were to be delivered by 2026, large swathes of the green belt would not be concreted over.
Even conservation groups had to accept in last year’s Regional Spatial Strategy review inquiry that government house-building targets would result in building on a quite small amount of green belt land.
Once the magic words green belt are mentioned, politicians lose all sense of reality. The red mist, or perhaps that should be the green mist, descends and it is impossible to conduct a rational debate.
What is actually required here is a full-scale review of the West Midlands green belt in order to identify parts that might reasonably be sacrificed, and earmark other parts of the countryside where there could even be an argument for extending planning restrictions.
Mr Pickles puts a lot of faith in local councils to take the right decisions as far as new housing is concerned. But councillors placed under pressure by noisy countryside campaigners are unlikely to take the tough decisions needed to deal with a housing crisis spurred on by an ageing population, the growth of single person households and increasing life expectancy.
This is precisely why a region like the West Midlands requires some form of strategic regional government. It’s not a matter of top-down bossiness, as Mr Pickles would have it, but a sensible approach to planning, transportation and housing issues.
The Regional Assembly, a toothless body in any case, has gone – to be replaced by what? A board consisting of the West Midlands council leaders does not fill one with enthusiasm.
It is time for Mr Pickles to do something really radical by bringing forward plans for a city region with executive powers.
