Planning has become increasingly disconnected from peoples’ lives because it no longer deals with many of the issues people care about. At the same time much of the political and media debate about the future of planning has become a largely sterile discussion of the merits of continued deregulation. Everyone should have a right, irrespective of earnings, to a decent home
Planning has played a transformational role in improving the quality of life of all of our communities. It has a critical responsibility, along with wider public interventions, to tackle entrenched poverty. Planning has the potential to enhance our wellbeing by ensuring access to high quality environments and economic opportunities and to give communities a voice in their future.
It is easy to forget that the planning movement sprang from the public health movement and the Victorian slums in the 19th century. It went beyond the basic drive to deliver more homes in a sanitary environment, to encompass designing an entire community, addressing social isolation and founded on a cooperative ethos. From the late 1940s to the late 1960s, 32 New Towns were built in the UK, towns which now house 2.6 million people. In London and numerous other cities, many people continue to live in the social housing designed in the 1920s and 1930s and in the well intentioned, but ultimately misguided, post-war high-rise blocks.
Planning offered people a better way of life, and as a nation we shared a collective ambition to rebuild Britain after both world wars. However, the post-war period saw a retrenchment of the explicit social aims of planning and a greater focus on technical professionalism.
That is why we have set out to reframe the debate about the future of planning through ‘Planning out Poverty’, a year-long research project by the Town and Country Planning Association and supported by the Webb Memorial Trust.
Our report is based on the study and analysis of four communities who are seeking a pathway to regeneration. They were selected for their diverse socio-economic backgrounds, distinct patterns of social exclusion and different urban spatial scales:
- Anfield, Liverpool – an inner-city Victorian community
- Shirebrook in the Derbyshire Coalfields – an ex-industrial rural town
- Middleton and Belle Isle, Leeds – part of a major inter-war social housing development based on Garden City principles
- Tottenham Hale, London Borough of Haringey – a diverse inner-city community.
The project provides strong evidence that planning could play a much more positive role by fully integrating (within both local and national public policy) with sectors such as regeneration and health and by reconnecting with issues that matter to local people. In an era of economic austerity and welfare reform, alongside the continued deregulation of planning, it is more important than ever that planning can deal with specific issues such as poverty reduction as well as in the wider public interest.
This reinvention of ‘social town planning’ will require a re-visioning of planning within wider social policy, rather than being left within a legislative cul de sac. Everyone should have a right, irrespective of earnings, to a decent home in a safe environment that helps promote their long-term wellbeing.
‘The Independent View‘ is a slot on Lib Dem Voice which allows those from beyond the party to contribute to debates we believe are of interest to LDV’s readers. Please email [email protected] if you are interested in contributing.
* Kate Henderson is Chief Executive of the Town and Country Planning Association
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2 Comments
How does planning impact on poverty?
Quoting from your report:
“Planning has multiple and complex effects on
people’s lives because its decisions often involve
the allocation of resources. Crudely, there are
winners and losers from planning decisions, and
planning therefore has the power to help promote
greater or lesser levels of equity and social justice.
This allocation of resources operates at a number of
levels, from the crude supply of provision to meet
basic needs such as housing, to the detailed way
that design decisions can promote better outcomes –
for example promoting better health outcomes
through walkable and safe environments. While
planning has moved away from crude forms of
environmental determinism, it is significant that
there is a growing weight of research evidence
which supports the link between health and
wellbeing and high-quality environments which
provide, for example, access to green space.3 This
linkage illustrates an important practical dimension
to the wider moral argument of poverty reduction,
namely the major reduction in costs to the public
purse if communities are well housed, healthier,
and happier. For example, it has been estimated
that the effects of poor housing costs the NHS at
least £600 million per year.”
Translating this into plain English, it seems you are asking for
a) a better quality living environment – this is something that is generally agreed to be an important goal of planning policy, although planning has on occasion dismally failed to deliver it, particularly in poorer areas.
b) where there are winners and losers, for the poor to be the winners and the rich the losers. I guess this means building the blocks of council flats in the middle of the most picturesque villages. That’s quite a big ask.
I sense the appeal of signing planners (and anybody else) up to the cause of poverty reduction, but planning is pretty monstrous already, and every time we demand it supports a good cause – the battle against problem gambling is another – it gets a little bit more monstrous.
So I was hoping for something a little bit stronger in terms of the impacts of planning on poverty, than what I’ve quoted, to justify it. I suspect we are some distance away from the root causes of poverty here.
Joe:
I really hope you could think of a more intelligent and effective way of favouring poor people over wealthy when their interests can’t be reconciled, than building large blocks of flats in the middle of picturesque villages. Many of us have seen the results of that sort of planning attempt to overcome social divides in an urban context, when the dwellers in the cheap estate are blamed for everything but their kids are at the very least cold-shouldered by others; and indeed, if most of them are out of work and there are prosperous people living around, some of the poorer people will steal.
The sort of intelligent policy many planners and many politicians could think of would be building a few low-cost starter homes and a few homes for rent in a village where local lower-income people (including most young people) cannot afford to stay; viewing favourably that planning application for the Bangladeshi mosque or viewing unfavourably an application to turn a popular pub into executive flats where the village’s other pub is largely a posh restaurant.