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Abstract

It is almost nine years since I left Islington Planning Department, where I had worked as urban design and conservation officer for 32 years.

Since my departure Islington Council, like all local authorities, has been subject to severe government spending cuts. The capacity of its planning departments, like others across the country, has been put under increasing pressure. The burden placed on local planning departments to fulfil their statutory duties has increased while resources to do the job have reduced.

The sad fact is that many local authority planning departments now have little time to do any more than development control. Old-fashioned ‘planning’, particularly the preparation of master-plans for large and complicated sites, is now often done by firms of consultants. This was the case, for example, on the King’s Cross Railway Land site across the border in Camden. Here the master-plan was produced by an architectural firm, and more significantly was commissioned and paid for by developer Argent.

The involvement of external consultants is ever widespread in the planning process. Planning applications for all but the smallest site now have to be accompanied by a wealth of documents and statements, covering design, heritage, sustainability, environmental impact, daylight and sunlight, travel plans and, in the case of housing, viability. The flaw in the system is that these statements are commissioned and paid for by the applicant. There is no guarantee whatsoever of impartiality.

My own experience, post-Islington, of working on various controversial schemes, such as Smithfield Market, on behalf of SAVE Britain’s Heritage and the Victorian Society, has been both revealing and depressing. It has shown that developers are prepared to pay huge sums to supposedly reputable consultants to say what suits them. In the heritage world one of the consequences of cuts in the public sector is that many people who once worked in local government or English Heritage now work in the private sector where, of course, they have to make a living. It is axiomatic that he who pays the piper calls the tune.

As local authority planning departments have been whittled down, so their ability and capacity to judge the veracity of applicants’ documents is also eroded. Perhaps the most invidious topic has been that of viability statements submitted by developers accompanying schemes which include, or were supposed to include, affordable housing. The widespread suspicion that the figures were often cooked to justify or excuse low levels of affordable provision has, thankfully, now attracted the attention of the new London Mayor, and his deputy responsible for housing, James Murray. I wish them the best of luck.

It would be a far better and fairer system if the developer/applicant was required to pay an adequate fee to the local planning authority so that it could make its own assessment, either by being able to employ its own in-house experts or by commissioning its own external advice. After all, it is the local planning authority that needs to evaluate and ultimately judge the planning application, not the applicant.

Without the necessary resources of time and expertise within planning departments the process of dealing with applications can become little more than a box-ticking exercise. At present the fees required to make an application are tiny compared to the costs incurred by the council in dealing with them, and something urgently needs to be done about this. Moreover this needs to be without “strings attached”. The idea that developers might pay more for priority treatment does not sit well in a system that should be fair for all.

While there is now a murmur of challenge within the government against the previously prevailing policies of austerity, there is as yet little sign of this actually being reversed within local government planning departments. The latest information from the Institute of Historic Building Conservation is that, across England, there are 38 per cent fewer conservation officers working in local authorities now than in 2008. A worrying number of local authorities, including some London boroughs, now have no conservation specialists.

One of the consequences of financial uncertainty and constraint has been the tendency in local government planning departments to hire temporary staff or to offer only short-term contracts. This results in a high rate of turnover in personnel, which does not help the process.

Cuts in resources mean planning departments have had to give priority to their statutory duties, such as dealing with planning applications and producing the statutory Local Plan and Supplementary Guidance. Pro-active work is a luxury that can no longer be afforded. For example, until 2008 Islington had a dedicated buildings-at-risk officer within the conservation team whose job was to take action against negligent owners and secure solutions for problematic historic buildings.

There was also a large grants programme, operated by two full-time officers, which helped owners and tenants in several commercial conservation areas to improve shopfronts and building facades, and also enhanced the public realm. The results of this good work can still be enjoyed in Chapel Market, Caledonian Road, Whitecross Street, Junction Road and Holloway Road. That scheme was also cut.

Meanwhile, among the national media and some government politicians, planners and conservation officers still carry the can for supposedly causing delays, raising “unnecessary barriers” to development and to stultifying economic growth. They have been completely unfairly blamed for the housing crisis in London and the South-east, when in reality there are numerous schemes with planning permission, potentially creating hundreds of thousands of homes, which developers are simply sitting on. Those are often the very same developers who are pressing the government to relax planning controls even further.

Since the introduction of the Town and Country Planning Act there has been an overwhelming case for a strong and fair planning system. The case is even stronger today, but it has to be a system democratically led and accountable, and properly funded. Reduction of controls and privatisation of the system is not the answer.

• A longer version of this article first appeared in the Journal of the Islington Archaeology & History Society.