As this column was going to press earlier this month Stephen Byers, the first ever Secretary of State for Transport, Local Government and the Regions, was poised to make his first big speech on planning.
Perhaps I should remind readers that this is a responsibility he now shares with Margaret Beckett, his counterpart at the even more newly minted Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs.
Under Whitehall's new geography Byers is in charge of urban and regional planning while Beckett looks after rural development and planning.
There is a third spectre at this less than joined-up Whitehall superstructure, namely Patricia Hewitt, who is in the hot seat at the Department of Trade and Industry. There she has overall responsibility for the construction industry and, because of the administration's emphasis in competitiveness and innovation, a more than academic interest in reforming the planning system to deliver the same.
If this leaves you a tad confused, join the club.
With that as the backdrop it will be intriguing, if not necessarily illuminating, to discover exactly how planning reform will be driven forward. Yup, it's definitely on the agenda but there are a large number of cooks and exactly which recipe they are working to is not yet absolutely clear cut.
Does indigestion loom? Quite likely, but I am loathe to prejudge things too quickly so early in the life of a new administration. But the institutional arrangements do look like the proverbial minefield.
There will be a green paper on planning in the autumn, no doubt about that. Officials are already beavering away. The Byers' speech I mentioned at the outset will provide some of the skeleton though not, at this stage, much in the way of the flesh.
Clearly speeding up the process will be high on the agenda which suggests something radical on the development plan front. It remains a crime that local authority performance is so dilatory here.
Plainly doing something about the way large infrastructure projects are handled will loom large. Those with long memories will recall that this is something successive governments have attempted to do something about: and failed, again and again.
It has proved a particularly tough nut to crack. So I wait to see how the present crew fare. Despite the fact that Chancellor Gordon Brown is involved I am not holding my breath. Byers, of course, comes as part of a ministerial package. Much of the day-to-day stuff is being handled by Sally Keeble, an ex journalist with a background in local government politics in the London Borough of Southwark, not to mention a spell as parliamentary private secretary to former housing minister Hilary Armstrong.
I mention all that simply to make the point that Ms Keeble arrives at the department with some baggage and some relevant experience.
Of course there is another name to conjure with, namely Lord Falconer, whose brief in the department is as minister for housing and planning.
He is a chum of Tony Blair and a lawyer by background. He was also in charge of the Dome during its meteoric fall to earth. You win some, you lose some. Where he stands on section 106s I know not, but I suspect we shall soon learn.
...little noise
It is conceivable that this passed you by, but one of the government's so-called headline indicators of sustainability is its target that 60% of new housing must be built on brownfield sites by 2008.
This political imperative to achieve sustainable development through land reuse should be familiar to those working in the development sector although I dare say not everyone would immediately quote it if asked about relevant policy drivers. All fine and dandy - but does anyone actually know what the term "sustainable development" means in practice? For example, which elements of a development need to be sustainable - the land remediation, the buildings themselves, the final uses, or all of these? Apologies for coming over all rhetorical on you but I have to admit that I have few answers to any of this and I'm not convinced ministers and officials are much more clued up either.
The good news is that the Oxford Centre for Sustainable Development at Oxford Brookes University is trying to get a handle on all this via a research project. The bad news is that the project will take three years. However, the researchers are already putting together case studies of brownfield development across the UK in a bid to see how practice fits with the researchers' view of an "ideal model" of sustainable brownfield development. Should prove instructive...
Source
Building Homes
