Time for a New Department of the Environment

Earlier this year, I was browsing through a construction industry magazine, when I came across a letter supporting the re-instatement of a Department of the Environment (like the one we had before the New Labour Government’s rather shortlived Department for the Environment, Transport and the Regions). What a good idea, I thought. It’s time for planning to to be restored to its proper place (ie in an Environment Department) as a key instrument of environmental conservation and protection, as I’m sure many in the construction and property industries would now agree !

ALL FORECASTS ARE EQUAL, but Some Forecasts are More Equal than Others….

Gordon the Pig had for many years lived under the shadow of a goat called Tony, but when Tony was sent into retirement, Gordon came to rule the roost. The roost in question was a pleasant, if rather decaying, farmyard (The Farm), owned by a couple called the Market-Forces. Now Gordon knew that the Market-Forces were minded to sell The Farm to a housing developer who wanted to build some nice new executive homes in the countryside. Some of the other animals who lived on The Farm, notably Prudence the Horse and Janet the Cat, were opposed to this plan, but Gordon and his New Gang (namely the other Porker, Ed, and Yvette the Sheep) were in favour of the Market-Forces plan.

It should be said that Gordon and Prudence had once been good friends, but their relationship had declined when Prudence noticed that, under the influence of Ed, Gordon had aquired a habit of telling “porkies”. Gordon called this habit being “economical with the truth” (“As you know, Prudence, I’m a great Porker with economic matters. In fact, Ed and I have aquired worldwide renown for our knowledge of Economy.”) Matters became worse when Ed introduced Gordon to Yvette the Sheep. “Now Yvette knows a great deal about Land Economy”, grunted Ed to Gordon one day. “Indeed, I do”, bleated Yvette, “and my friend Kate knows even more than I do”….. 

Observing the machinations of Gordon and his New Gang, Prudence expressed her unease to Janet the Cat. “I’m very worried, and not just about the future of The Farm”, she said. “You know that our friend Piers the Plowman met with a long serving official of the Shire (the county in which they all lived) a while ago. Well, apparently this local council officer had been told that by a government agency that the Shire might experience extreme climate scenarios, ranging from severe flooding to drought”. Janet nodded, she too had heard about these forecasts. Like Prudence, she also knew that the Market-Forces, along with Gordon and the New Gang, were minded to downplay both short and longer term weather forecasts….

“We’re far more concerned with housing forecasts and economic growth !”, grunted Gordon and Ed. “We want to work with the Market-Forces and build lots more houses in the countryside”, bleated Yvette and Kate. “We won’t be constained by what you and your friends call “environmental capacity”, by which we take you to mean things like climatic and air quality conditions, topography, propensity to flood, existing and future investment in infrastructure. Frankly, Prudence, we don’t know much about these  matters, and we don’t want to”. “No, we don’t want to !” Ed grunted; and Yvette and Kate again bleated : “We’re only interested in housing forecasts  and economic growth !”.

Now Piers the Plowman had been a silent observer of the antics of Gordon and his New Gang. “This ‘All Forecasts are Equal, but Some Forecasts are More Equal than Others’ ” ideology concerns me greatly, especially when it has such a strong grip on regional planning policy, like the West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy. It is time for me to compose a “New Vision of Piers Plowman”, a re-working of my Malvern ancestor’s medieval poem, in a contemporary form, such as a blog. That’s it I’m going to blog “The New Vision of Piers Plowman” in readiness for the West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy Preferred Option Examination in Public next year !”. Prudence and Janet guessed at Piers’s plan, and they whinneyed and miawed loudly in support of it.

Harry Potter to be Prime Minister ? (and “A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups”)

I have to confess to never having read a J K Rowling novel : so much to read, so little time and all that… However, since reading in the Weekend Financial Times the other week that Ms Rowling is to be made a “cultural ambassador” by Prime Minister Gordon Brown, it has struck me that a number of government ministers bear more than a passing resemblence to the screen Harry Potter ( Yes, I have watched one or two of the films), albeit in a more mature, even middle-aged, mould. I’m thinking, for instance, of Hilary Benn (note the spectacles), the Miliband brothers, and the new Minister for the West Midlands, (?) Liam Byrne. Incidentally, if David Miliband is to be a future prime minister, I’m sure the actor who plays Harry Potter could perform his part very well. Oh, and I sincerely hope I’m not blurring (or should that be “blairring”) the boundaries between fantasy and reality in expressing this view.

Returning to J K Rowling, I believe she is a fan of the writer and Oxford don, C S Lewis, whose work I also very much admire and enjoy. Having read the “Chronicles of Narnia” as a child, I’m now following “The Cosmic Trilogy” :  well, not quite following as I read the final book of the trilogy, “That Hideous Strength”, first. Lewis himself describes this book as “A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups”, and if I describe the story as inhabiting a world somewhere between that of Harry Potter (as reflected in the film versions) and  George Orwell, I hope people might get the gist.  “That Hideous Strength” ( about a power more terrible even than that of the “Big Clunking Fist””) is set somewhere in the West Midlands. Lewis suggested some similarity between the City of Durham and the locus for his book. However, when its fictional residents escape to Birmingham and Worcester (yes, Worcester !) following a highly localised, but rather violent, tectonic shift (remember that Prescottism ?) towards the end of the story, a university town in somewhere like Warwickshire comes to mind. I’ve no hard evidence base for this, but nevertheless…

Anyway, I strongly recommend “That Hideous Strength”, published in the mid-1940s, and therefore around the time of a previous new Labour administration, as summer reading, particulary for government ministers, Harry Potter lookalikes or not, but for ordinary people too. Evidence-based types will find its “National Institute for Co-Ordinated Experiments”, or NICE,  very interesting indeed (if not very nice !).

Boris Johnson for New Greater Birmingham Mayor ?

Its a shame, in my view, that Boris Johnson isn’t standing for elected mayor of Greater Birmingham. I know this position doesn’t exist just yet, but it could do in the not too distant future. It seems to me that Boris is the kind of politician who could slim down the plethora of quangos that dominate the West Midlands conurbation and wider region  : get them on their bikes and all that ! Goodness knows, we might end up being more sustainable, environmentally and otherwise, as well !

What “Advantage” for the West Midlands ?

Yesterday, BBC Midlands Today reported that the West Midlands Regional Assembly is to be wound up and its responsibilities taken over by the Regional Development Agency (ie quango), Advantage West Midands. The current chairman of the Regional Assembly, a Lichfield conservative councillor, warned than local authorities in the West Midlands were not merely in danger of “having their teeth pulled” (using the BBC interviewer’s expression) but of being, in his own words, “castrated”. The news item then ended rather abruptly : not material for family television perhaps. Heaven forbid, people in the region might start taking more interest in the democratic process ! Now that would be an a real “Advantage” for the West Midlands !

The Question of “Soundness” in Spatial Plans …. and Horses

Last week I attended a “Development Plan Document” (DPD) Examination in Worcester’s Guildhall. I will not enter here into what constitutes a DPD (as the jury may be out on this question at present), but just say that this is a document, which, if adopted by the local authority, has statutory status. A DPD forms part of the new Local Development Framework (LDF) spatial planning system, which has replaced land use-based local plans. I can see advantages and disadvantages to the LDF system. On the one hand for instance, this offers more flexibility, and on the other, in my opinion, the LDF approach may turn out to be even more unwieldy than the old land use planning system which it is replacing.

The Examination process – itself a replacement for the Local Plan Inquiry, although it is still precided over by a Planning Inspector – confronts the DPD with a number of “tests”  for (or “of”) “soundness”. One of these “tests”concerns the use of Sustainability Appraisal/ Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA/SA). In the case of Worcester City Council’s DPD, entitled “Balanced Housing Market”, the robustness, and, indeed potential “unsoundness”, of the SA/SEA was a key issue for the Examination. However, the charge of “unsoundness” levelled at the DPD went wider than this. According to Examination “representors” a number of tests for (or “of”) “soundness” had not been met.

In writing his report on the Examination, the Planning Inspector is left with a number of options. These include : allowing the planning authority extra time with the aim that a “sound” DPD will emerge; reducing the scope of the DPD to render it “sound”; or recommending that the DPD be abandonned because it is fundamentally “unsound”. I will not attempt to speculate on the likely outcome of last week’s Worcester City Council “Balanced Housing Market” DPD Examination, except to say that it is unlikely, in my view, that the DPD could be adopted in its present form. Nevertheless, I think important lessons will have been learnt by those involved in the Examination.

Now, having discussed the question of “soundness” in spatial plans, I want to reflect on this quality, and its absense, in horses. I have another blog (well, several others actually !) entitled “Horse Work”,  and in a post entitled “What they don’t teach you at the equine vetinary schoool”, I also reflect on the issue of soundness in horses. In this, I praise the utility and qualities of traditional horsepersons :

“They would have been good judges of equine conformation and temperament, and of conditions which appropriate management could make good, or substantially improve upon, as distinct from those which should be avoided at all costs.”

Returning to the subject of spatial planning, it seems that comparable judgements also apply : there are certain situations which “appropriate managment could make good, or substantially improve upon”, and others “which should be avoided at all costs” : West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy Revionists please take note !

Brown’s Remarkably White New Cabinet*

*Cabinet, in this instance, refers not to an article of furniture, but to the group of senior government ministers charged by the new prime minister with running our country, and also to similar groupings found in local government.

The River Severn has brought some remarkably dark and earthy brown water to Worcester in recent days, in unprecedented seasonal floods, even for a city accustomed (some might say famous for) to flooding. However, whilst these floods have, somewhat surprisingly, taken the City of Worcester rather unprepared and caused considerable local difficulties, these problems need to be placed in the context of much more severe flooding elsewhere, and particularly in the old Labour heartland of South Yorkshire.

The reaction of the powers that be to the floods have been, I think its fair to say,  somewhat lacklustre. Personally, I’ve always regarded Gordon Brown as a politician even more detached from ordinary reality than Tony Blair, if that were possible. So it comes as no surprise that the flooding seems to have completely passed him by. Like Stalin, to whom he has been compared, Gordon Brown inhabits a world of political administration remote from the earthy dark brown waters now wreaking havoc with many people’s homes and businesses. Admittedly, the flooding has co-incided with a change of administration, in the form of Brown’s remarkably white new Cabinet, but this is no excuse.

My own view is that our erstwhile great white hope for the environment, David Milliband, was also rather lacklustre in his role as former Secretary of State for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. Will the former Secretary of State for International Development, Hilary Benn, perform any better ? Mr “Nice” Milliband seemed to lack the necessary “b..s” for the task, but perhaps only the former Chancellor’s “Representative on Earth”, Ed Balls, is allowed any “b..s”(along with the Prime Minister, of course). Incidently, Mr Balls’s wife is Housing (and Planning ?) Minister, Yvette Cooper : I tend to think of  her as a single issue minister, not sure why !

Now Ms Cooper (along with her husband) is the kind of sqeaky clean minister to which Brown’s remarkably white new Cabinet aspires, although I’m still not clear whether she has a place in it or not. Alas then, that we do not live in a squeaky clean white world, as the new Environment Secretary surely knows, or should do anyway. For as International Development Secretary, he was implored by fellow ministers from African countries (yes, I’m talking about Africa now !) to make his Cabinet colleagues, including the former Chancellor and his Representative on Earth, enforce greater money laundering restrictions in this country, and particulary in London (now the world’s money “laundry of choice). Such restrictions could greatly help reduce international corruption.

The fact is that Gordon Brown’s remarkably white new Cabinet needs, like the former Blair administration, to clean up its act. One would therefore have hoped, not for hope of the great white kind (and I don’t mean sharks, or do I ?), but for a less homogenous, dare I say more diverse, group of people in the Cabinet, less inclined to agree with one another. But Brown, like Stalin, does not like people who disagree with him, and in this distaste for serious debate within government he is a man of this time. For in “cabinets” (ie those of local government) around the country, run by many “little Stalins”, serious debate on the environment, planning and sustainable development, amongst other important issues, is also been stifled by “Brownite” politicians (or perhaps that should be brown-white politicians, to use some Orwellian doublethink) and their apparats : and I’m not talking about white goods here !