‘Planning needs to be brought up to date'
10:14am Thursday 17th July 2008
BASINGSTOKE is being damaged by planning decisions that start with bureaucrats in remote, unelected assemblies and end with Government rules that give the whip hand to developers over local councils. The balance has to change.
The current economic crisis will force a slowdown. It gives us a chance to strengthen our Local Plan so that we can more effectively resist house conversions into flats and improve parking standards. More importantly, we need to rethink our tired planning strategies.
For 50 years, planners have shaped towns by drawing boxes on maps - houses over here, jobs over there, shopping somewhere else.
It's out-of-date thinking. It forces people to travel to do the basics of life - to go to work, to visit the shops. If we want to ease the pressure on our roads, we need to mix homes, jobs and shops together, so that people really can walk or cycle to work.
Then we have to fight the Government's numbers game. Basingstoke's natural' rate of growth is about 600 homes per year, but the Government wants us to build up to 1,000 per year. Those 400 extra' homes each year are for people moving here from outside the borough.
Can we cope? No. We already have an infrastructure deficit requiring hundreds of millions of pounds of Government cash to make good.
Consider travel. If Basingstoke's jobs grow more slowly than our working population, more people will commute at peak times, further crowding our roads and packed-out trains.
Is there a Government commitment to a grade-separated junction at Black Dam, dualling of the A33 to Reading or a Basingstoke parkway railway station? No. There's just housing, without infrastructure.
Can our sewage works cope with the growth without over-polluting the River Loddon? No, according to the Environment Agency.
Is our water supply adequate? No, according to the suppliers. They're talking about metering and rationing by price.
Can the health service cope with the growth? No. In fact, promised local doctors' surgeries are being replaced by the travel when you're ill' concept of super-surgeries.
Post offices are closing. The driving test centre is going. Our infrastructure is actually going DOWN while our population is going UP. It's all wrong.
It gets worse. Developers have returned to the worst of the failed experiments of the 1960s - tower blocks, and, worse still, inadequately-managed tower blocks.
Crown Heights is the disaster that some of us warned it would be, and the people who permitted it should be ashamed of themselves. But Crown Heights was on the regional assembly's website as a glowing example of how to do things right! Sheer madness!
Ultra-high-density developments like Crown Heights have happened because planning has been dominated by quantity and not by quality. Quality means building proper homes with a spare room. Quality means privacy and security. Quality means planning for cars properly, not ignoring them.
If flats are built they need strong management companies and concierge services to make them work properly.
We need a change of approach from top to bottom. The Government must stop trying to get growth on the cheap. That's the route to tower blocks and gridlock.
We urgently need up-front infrastructure investments just to make good the current deficit. The unelected regional assemblies must go. Planning should be bottom-up, not top-down.
Councils must have the freedom to do what is right for their areas, to implement policies that put the emphasis on quality of life.
In short, Britain needs to return to a planning concept that used to serve us well - democracy.
-Councillor Stephen Reid