Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
Planning was allowed to break down into a series of disjointed and pragmatic
initiatives, operating in very different ways in different areas and policy settings.
This was entirely consistent with other strands of Thatcherism. If there was 'no
such thing as society', then it made no sense to plan as if there were.
(Ward 1994 p. 208)
Initially the Environment Secretary, Michael Heseltine, made a number of typically
buccaneering claims that the planning process was stifling wealth-creation. In a series
of ministerial circulars to planning authorities he made clear that a more 'positive'
attitude (i.e. sympathetic to market forces) needed to be adopted.
In 1985 Heseltine's successor Nicholas Ridley notified authorities that there should
be a presumption in favour of planning permission being granted unless objections could
be sustained. A White Paper 'Lifting the Burden' (DOE 1985) stated that in future
approved development plans would be but one of several material considerations to be
taken account of in determining planning applications - in other words that planning
policies could be over-ridden if other factors such as responding to business enterprise
so indicated. Ridley was able to enforce these changes through major development
applications which he was empowered to 'call in' for decision personally or which were
referred to him on appeal. Several large-scale, out-of-town 'regional shopping centres'
such as Cribbs Causeway near Bristol and Bluewater in Kent and their attendant
massive traffic flows are Ridley's unfortunate personal legacy.
Whilst the Conservative Government wanted to relieve business and property
developers from the burden of planning regulation they also had to have regard to the
wishes of many Conservative voters who relied upon the planning system to protect
their local amenity and property values. The virtues of individualism and self-reliance
espoused by Mrs Thatcher found inconvenient but particularly virulent expression
in the anti-development campaigns by well-heeled 'NIMBY' groups ('not in my back
yard'). The political contradictions were well illustrated in the fate of several privately
promoted 'new settlements' which were encouraged by the Conservative Government,
but conceived independently of the statutory planning process. In the event public
opposition was such that none of the proposed settlements won planning approval,
although the outcome teetered for some time.
The development planning system was nevertheless substantially modified in the
first half of the 1980s with the aim of speeding up the process. Structure plans were
neatly obliterated in the conurbations as a consequence of the abolition of the GLC and
the Metropolitan County Councils, thereby removing strategic planning from precisely
those areas where it was most needed. A narrower form of 'unitary' development plan
was introduced in the metropolitan districts instead.
6.8 Inner cities and urban development corporations
The Conservative Government could not detach itself from an obligation to address
the profound economic, social and environmental problems of inner city areas which
the private sector had effectively abandoned. The message was brought home to the
population at large by a wave of riots in Liverpool and several other cities in the early
1980s.
Heseltine believed that the (Labour controlled) local authorities in the inner cities
were incapable practically and politically of taking the action needed to generate the
interest of the private sector. In a move of unabashed centralism the Government
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