The best job as a reporter on a local newspaper in the 1980s was being asked to cover Beaujolais Nouveau Day. It was always on a Thursday in November, and the Newbury Weekly News went to press on a Wednesday.
So, you simply toured the local pubs drinking red wine on expenses under no deadline pressure, with the excuse of returning to the town’s taverns a few days later to get some quotes from the landlords on how the day went, and drink something far more palatable.
The worst job? Covering Wednesday night planning sub-committee meetings. At the time I didn’t recognise the importance of those sessions in terms of local housing, infrastructure, and the economic and social well-being of the West Berkshire town and its environs. The only thing I recognised those nights was the constant threat of missing last orders.
The councillors were well-meaning but liked to talk, testing the shorthand skills I had learnt on day release to the Sylvia Grimwood Secretarial College for Ladies – those stories are for after the watershed. But, and maybe this is a false memory based on what I know now, I’m sure I recall planning officers shaking their heads in frustration as their recommendations to approve were invariably refused after the most spurious of one-eyed arguments; a sense that local councillors were there to lie down in front of the bulldozer to preserve the dog walks of their constituents, whose taxes then had to fund the inevitable appeals. And remember Newbury was not some sleepy backwater; this market town was to become part of the UK’s Silicon Valley.
I had to contribute to the business pages of the newspaper too, with regular calls – from a landline – to a promising start up called Racal Vodafone. Whatever happened to them? And no I didn’t buy shares. I even remember comedian Ernie Wise making the first public mobile phone call from London to their Newbury offices.
It is fair to say mobile telecommunications have moved on a fair pace since. Planning? There are geriatric snails with pulled hamstrings who move quicker, although at least they have the benefit of a roof over their heads.
My sector experience and expertise may be limited to housebuilding but – and planning is about far more than just houses – has there ever been a political process as utterly inept and unfit for purpose as the UK’s planning system?
Why on earth are some of the most important decisions on the planet – and it is planetary, impacting economically, socially and environmentally – in the hands, deliberately so, of amateurs? It is democracy gone mad.
We have planning officers making informed, researched recommendations, hopefully with a nod to policy, only for Mrs Miggins – great pie making, no idea of placemaking – and Mr Magoo – ‘You’re looking at the wrong plan Councillor’ – to give approvals the thumbs down.
To this day almost every property headline in any local newspaper is based entirely on housing being perceived as a community blight. ‘Villagers up in arms as new homes get the green light. ‘Dancing in the street as housebuilder’s plans to create places for people to live are thrown out.’ I should know, I probably wrote some of those headlines back in the day covering the parish politics of West Berkshire.
Among Labour’s promises (insert joke here. Spoiler alert: they lied) were to recruit 300 new planners – a laughable number set against another ludicrous pledge to build 1.5m new homes. The HBF reckons we probably need about 2,200 new planners, not forgetting the desperate need for more lawyers and ecologists too.
Catherine Williams, formerly of Bellway Homes, has just started as the HBF’s new planning director. Williams says outline planning can take 18 months to get a resolution and then nine to 12 months for the S106 to be agreed.
“In a lot of cases, these are allocated sites so have perhaps been in the system for several years before making an application and there are still reserved matters to secure before delivery can begin,” says Williams.
Ecology, flood risk, transport, highways, climate change, heritage, archaeology, there can be, says Lawrence Turner of Boyer, more than 100 different written reports and assessments needed to prepare a Local Plan.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) could of course do plenty of heavy lifting and whether you are wary of, or welcome, the rise of the machines, planning and conveyancing are surely no-brainers – well no human brains anyway – given the amount of repetitive data, ancient and modern, required.
Maybe we should replace councillors with robots too. You wouldn’t want the cyborgs too smart though, or they will revert to subjective not objective decisions, such as refusing to concede a green field for development. ‘Where would I walk K9?”
There is a government pledge – there’s that furniture polish again waxing laughable – to integrate AI into local planning authorities. The programme is called Extract, which, had I owned a Racal Vodafone, is the call I would have made many times to a SWAT team while sitting in a Newbury planning sub-committee meeting.
This article was first featured in Show House Magazine. Read more like this and the latest industry insight here.
