Industry | 2009.11.16
This bulldozing of nimbys must not become colonial | Julian Glover
A new planning body that puts the national interest ahead of local concerns is welcome, but must be closely watched
\'I became green everywhere in the first spring, after London ended, so that all the country looked alike," wrote Richard Jeffries at the start of his entrancing but rarely read novel After London. He was a Victorian farmer\'s son who died young, after dreaming his vision of a post-industrial England drowned by noxious floods and strangled by forests. He predicted environmental apocalypse as modern climate scientists do: but in his world some undescribed calamity had ended urban civilisation and nature had overcome the cities. Today the fear is the reverse: that the cities will overcome nature.
Jeffries wrote of brambles and briars, oxeye daisies and charlock. He described long mounds over which, it was said, "machines worked by fire" had passed. "They traversed the land swift as the swallow glides through the sky, but of these things not a relic remains to us." His future was dystopian, with the few hungry survivors of disaster bound to their masters as serfs. But his dismay would surely have been greater had he known, a century on, how much of the rural land he loved was to disappear.
Britain has not done badly, given the pressure of a big population on a small island, to have saved as much of its countryside as it has; but the changes since Jeffries\'s time have been immense. Six-armed steel pylons haunt the skyline; roads and traffic noise are ubiquitous; the sodium glow of streetlights raids the night sky. All of this because of choices made by planners between the harm and the benefits of development. Britain has lurched between enforced paralysis and commercial expansion. In some places there are faux rustic villages in which the colour of every door is prescribed. Elsewhere boxy, ugly warehouses spread along the edges of motorways.
Once, at least, it was easy to declare all development environmentally harmful; green protesters knew where they stood. Now climate change has thrown a conundrum into the mix. The infrastructure of the carbon economy must be replaced by a new infrastructure. Blocking change can only sustain the status quo. Where does this leave anyone who wants to limit global warming, but save Britain\'s countryside too?
Today in the Commons, the climate change secretary, Ed Miliband, will announce the first six national policy statements, which will direct the new Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC). There will be proposals for the sites of nuclear plants, and more support for windfarms, clean coal and wave energy, and the power lines needed to link these to the grid. His statement marks the coming to life of an express planning process that will, if it survives, change England\'s appearance more fundamentally than any of the superficialities that have received more attention at Westminster recently – MPs\' expenses , for instance.
Under old planning rules, big projects took years to pass through public inquiries. Now schemes will be approved or rejected in weeks. Once the IPC has made its decision, ministers will not be able to reverse it – even the courts will struggle to be heard. This system defies modern political fashion: it is centralist and commanding. It is opposed by the Conservatives, whose formal position is to scrap the commission – although in private they want to keep it in disguise, as part of the Planning Inspectorate.
Crudely, the IPC puts the national interest, as defined by ministers, ahead of local concerns: it is a bulldozer to the nimby\'s charter. Opportunities for the public to express a view are flimsily framed, relying on that notoriously ambiguous term "consult". The law says the public must be consulted. It does not say that if the public, once consulted, oppose a scheme it should not go ahead. In short, it sounds horrific.
It is also necessary. The planning of core national projects needs to be accelerated. A decade-long public inquiry stuffed with expensive lawyers is no more likely to find compromise. The Sizewell B nuclear inquiry took six years to secure planning consent, cost £30m, and only 30 of the 340 inquiry days were devoted to local issues. It was obvious from the start that the power station would be built; the inquiry began from first principles that should have been settled by government.
But there should surely be a counterpoint. The IPC\'s remit must be tightened so that its decisions apply to a handful of big projects of national importance – what might be called schemes to keep the nation\'s lights on and transport moving. The threat to the countryside comes less from a few nuclear plants or a new high-speed rail line than from the general degrading of the difference between what is urban and what is rural.
The risk is the IPC will soon move on from creating infrastructure in the public interest to fast tracking commercial development. It is disturbing that it wants to process 50 or 60 applications a year. It was certainly wrong to publish a list of schemes it wanted to work on before the first departmental national policy statement had been published. That mocks the process laid down in law. The test of the IPC will be whether it ever says no. If it ticks through all applications – a bypass here, 60 miles of pylons there – with the arrogance of some colonial administrator trying to modernise a backward land, it must go.
England\'s ruination, foreseen by Richard Jeffries 120 years ago, has been avoided so far thanks to luck, and to planners. Now is not the moment to surrender to concrete and calamity.
For more information, please visit
http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/[...]ion-environment-infrastructure
