image for illustration: Open Government Licence v3.0
Jeremy Melvin has posted a his view on the history of planning in Labour as part of the World Architecture Festival.
…government see a ‘streamlined’ planning system as integral to creating growth…
World Architecture Festival writes:
‘We will immediately update the Planning Policy Guidance Framework’, trumpeted the Labour Party’s manifesto, setting out the programme for which it won a massive parliamentary majority (but only 20 per cent of the popular vote) in the UK’s recent general election, writes Jeremy Melvin. This is in a section labeled ‘Kickstart Economic Growth’, and it goes on to reference the usual platitudes about making home ownership affordable – a genuine problem across most of the UK – prioritizing brownfield land for development, and only releasing the green belt ‘in the right places’, presumably that sliver of constituencies which were unenlightened enough to elect Conservative MPs.
This wondrous new policy will also respect biodiversity, nature and sustainability. Coupled with the idea of making the UK a ‘green energy superpower’ through establishing an entity called Great British Energy, it will doubtlessly lead towards the New Jerusalem which Labour has promised us for most of its 130-year existence. Apart, though, from that old tried, tired and tested Soviet stratagem of ‘setting targets’, it is unclear how this will be delivered, let alone how it will ‘kickstart economic growth’.
All this is part of a long-term trend in Western democracies, where the electorate expects governments to solve all their problems – economic, financial, aspirational, health, intellectual development and housing. Leave aside for a moment Hayek’s persuasive argument in The Road to Serfdom (1943), that allowing the state to plan our existence runs the risk of the title. The trend dates back to the late 19th century when politicians began to adopt what Robert Skidelsky (in his biography of J M Keynes) terms the ‘Benthamite calculus’ of trying to ensure ‘the greatest good for the greatest number’. This makes a certain amount of sense in a mass democracy, but it created an open invitation for those of a bossy disposition – already overrepresented among politicians – to impose their will on the rest of us.
A recent partial analysis of this trend can be found in a recent book by FT columnist Ruchir Sharma, What Went Wrong with Capitalism (2024). He argues that policies followed by politicians and central bankers seek to remove all risk from capitalism, using fiscal policy and interest rates to try to abolish the possibility of recession. Sharma argues that this undermines the very essence and virtue of capitalism for ‘creative destruction’, and hence wealth creation and redistribution. This may seem some way removed from policies affecting spatial planning, but to the incoming Labour government – as to the Conservatives before them – the British planning system has been regarded as a break on economic growth. That growth is the Holy Grail of followers of the Benthamite calculus, as it generates greater revenue for governments to spend on public services, avoiding or reducing the need to increase taxes. Its success hinges around increasing productivity, a longstanding problem in the UK, recently exaggerated by Covid-related policies which enforced state-subsidized idleness. Incidentally, the Labour leader at the time, now prime minister Sir Keir Starmer, demanded those policies should last longer, be more restrictive and imposed more frequently. Does he still think that?…
… In order to understand how Labour’s ambitions might work, we need to separate a certain amount of wheat from a great deal of chaff. Chief among this amalgam is a long- running confusion between spatial and economic planning. In the late 19th century, town planning – at least in the UK – became an object of public policy. Its main concern was public health, in response to the unhealthy conditions of slum housing. This spawned a series of local bye laws and settlements known pejoratively as ‘bye law housing’. One popular solution to this in the first decade of the 20th century was garden cities, to which Raymond Unwin would give an unmistakable image, apparently based on traditional Cotswold-style villages, but with underlying radical elements which found their apotheosis in the modernist houses schemes of the 1920s. Unwin’s influence continued through the housing for munitions workers built during World War I, the ‘homes for heroes’ campaign in its aftermath and into the generation of public housing built through the 1920s…
Housing and health became indelibly associated, grouped in the same ministry which after the Labour victory in 1945 was headed by Aneurin (Nye) Bevan…
As Keynes had been the intellectual force behind the Macmillan Commission, so Patrick Abercrombie was on the Barlow Commission. He largely authored the commission’s minority report, which was eventually – and unusually – adopted over that of the majority. This advocated the creation of a Ministry of Town and Country Planning, which became the apex of the implementation of spatial planning as an economic policy…. They included Harlow, Crawley, Hemel Hempstead, Peterlee and Milton Keynes. Conceptually, if not aesthetically, they were very close to the garden cities, with the thread of continuity being Frederick Osborn, leading light in the Town and Country Planning Association, who wrote in 1977, shortly before the end of his very long life, that coupled with the 1946 New Towns Act, the TCPA of 1947 created a ‘machinery for positive town construction’.
Interestingly, each of the towns mentioned above had a noted architect as its chief planner, respectively Sir Frederick Gibberd, the urbane old Harrovian Anthony Monoprio, Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe, Berthold Lubetkin and Walter Bor (of Llewelyn-Davies, Weeks, Forestier-Walker and Bor). All were qualified successes, the qualification perhaps most forcibly proven in a BBC documentary made in the 1960s and fronted by Reyner Banham – a new town sceptic and colleague of Llewelyn-Davies at the Bartlett – who argued that their inevitable fate was, not as Osborn (and before him the instigator of garden cities Ebenezer Howard) hoped, to be self-sufficient settlements, but to be gobbled up by and become satellites of the nearest big city, in most cases, London. Even the fiercest and most enlightened legislation could not prevent this from happening…
… Both the defeated Conservative government and today’s incoming Labour government see a ‘streamlined’ planning system as integral to creating growth. While the Conservatives performed so many U-turns and somersaults over planning policy that it is hard to identify an intellectual programme, the Labour Party has been more explicit. All the present ills, it claims, stem from ‘Tory mistakes’ and all can be solved by enlightened planning, largely of a spatial variety. Apparently, at least so far, without any apparent means of delivery, planning can solve our housing crisis, our lack of transport, our productivity deficit, and bring us energy security. New Jerusalem, here we come! And like New Jerusalem, or the wait for Godot in Samuel Beckett’s eponymous play, there is no clarity, at least yet, about means and method of delivery.
