Ways, means and mutual benefits of effective engagement with authorities and other key actors elsewhere in the Wider South East, throughout the London Planning process.
Notes from a (Third) Roundtable Discussion at the London School of Economics: March 20th 2024
This roundtable involved some 25 invited participants coming from the London Assembly, London boroughs, central government, West London Alliance, South East Councils, London HE institutions, consultants/independent researchers, civic/community organisations, Future of London and the RTPI[1].
Introduction
The event was organised in two halves: the first focused on conventionally core “planning” concerns with patterns of physical development, including housing (Green Belt etc.), with local authorities as key actors; and the second broadened coverage to bring in both more economic development aspects/prospects and a wider range of potential actors / networks.
Putting London Planning in a Wider South East Context
Introducing This part was introduced by Catriona Riddell (independent consultant, formerly with the South East Regional Assembly) who saw the central challenge as being one of filling a more or less blank canvas left by 14 years of little happening between London and its Wider South East neighbours. Planning mechanisms in London are different to those in the rest of the country with very direct interaction with central government. How local authorities deal with one another has been subject to considerable uncertainties particularly with respect to the Duty to Co-operate. Everything depends on what happens in the upcoming general election. The current government has recently replaced the Duty to Cooperate with an Alignment Test set out in the National Planning Policy framework, linked to ensuring that everywhere has up-to-date local plans The Labour party were developing other ideas.
Catriona argued that that regional strategic planning is an absolute necessity and should be done on the basis of functional geographies. But the question is then which ones – waste and minerals, housing markets, transportation? There is little incentive to answer these questions and set up an agreed mechanism while no money follows.
She noted that few planners currently in place had worked within the pre 2010 system with its formal strategic approach to local planning. The expertise has retired so strategic planning would have to be relearned. There is a general lack of funding with many councils broke or ‘bankrupt’. They are pulling back to what they have to do on a statutory basis while strategic planning is voluntary. London has good research capabilities, but there is no attempt at consistent data collection across authorities outside the capital. The London Plan requires collaboration, but nothing outside of London says that this cooperation has to go both ways.
Whatever structure is put in place, there needs to be parity between London’s Mayor and the Wider South East representatives. Until there is a quid pro quo, it is not about what the Mayor needs, it is about what WSE gets out of interaction. A change in the approach to strategic planning is needed, and overwhelmingly most developers, community groups, NGOs etc agree it should be mandated. Then it is a question of how do we make this work better in terms of rules of engagement? How can we make the whole city region work from planning, transport, etc perspectives?
In discussion, it was argued that the old arguments about housing an overspill from London but that with the tightening up of Greenfield use the shortfall in housing is as significant in the rest of the South East as much as London – and spreading further afield through displacement chains. It was a region-wide problem that needed collaboration, but there were obstacles to this from both sides, including unwillingness on the London Mayor’s party.
Another participant argued that across the Wider South East there was a need for strategic planning, to have an agreed evidence base and scenario testing. But also for central government guidance on the criteria for strategic development – and a national spatial plan linking infrastructure planning to the wider Leveling Up agenda. Alternatively there was a suggestion for a return to regional planning guidance (RPGs), rather than any centrally dominated statutory framework.
Imbalances of power were another issue that was brought up. There was resistance to the possibility of the Mayor of London being able to steamroll over everybody else. Partnership needed to be on a basis where each party can get something out of interaction – with quid pro quou’s (i.e. deals), which might relate to strategic infrastructure that doesn’t sit with either central or local government and had a functional geography which could offer frameworks for collaboration
In summing up, Catriona said that experience in this region showed that forced partnerships do not work. There has to be a willingness to work together based on recognized (sub-regional) interdependences and mutual respect rooted in long term relationships. A potential moment of change was coming after the election. There would be a strong case for experts to work hard with the GLA to come to the table together with other political leaders to fill the gap opened up in recent years in terms of ownership, dialogue, and sponsorship. Building the necessary partnership and trust takes time, and agreement both about principles of interaction and ways of securing these. Maybe funding, from somewhere, could provide an incentive – as “One thing that moves councilors is funding”.
There was general agreement about much of that. If less about the value of more formal/top-down frameworks than about the need now for a serious Conversation about what has to happen next in order to re-grow (and in some cases just grow) partnership, trust, collaborative skills and understandings of where there are “quid pro quos” to be deployed.
Engagement on Issues beyond Land Use and with a Wider Set of Actors
Introducing the discussion of a broader field of engagement Mark Tewdr Jones (from the UCL Bartlett School of Planning) emphasised the need, for us and the London Plan, to deploy a more ambitious, visionary and long term approach. The process needed to be more proactive to secure long term change in relation to issues such as climate change, structural inequalities, housing profiles, growth and innovation from which he thought the London Plan had retreated.
Planning was not an end in itself, but a means to a set of ends – including the renewal of democracy, through use of informal city forums to pick up on the passion that people have to discuss their cities – building partnerships and projects in the process (as e.g. in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Paris). Localised responses have ripple effect, feeding into a version of strategic planning focused on the medium to long term, but operating as an ongoing, proactive and place-sensitive process.
Questions from others about this alternative, highly participatory vision for strategic planning raised issues about: its practicality in a large metropolis, who makes decisions and specifically how it would deal with inequities, where resources come from, and how it could be reconciled with the set of statutory duties (“the heavy lifting”) that the government required of an area plan. To each of these were plural answers – prioriitising the point that existing arrangements for planning (especially at strategic level) offer very little opportunity or incentive for the exercise of voice (or even debate); emphasising that it was about a toolkit of methods, deployed on various levels, as agencies often already do; it does not wait for the state to get things started, and local authorities would not be initiators but would still make the decisions; funding and human inputs could come from a great range of sources but budgets would be fixed.
In Mark’s words: “This is not a visionary idea in relation to other global cities. There needs to be soundness, legitimacy, and evidence to shape the plan in the wider debate of where we are going. But there is currently nowhere to have that debate. What we are talking about here is not to challenge structure but to enhance the public voice”.
Other pertinent questions were asked about: the balancing of activity to attract inward investment versus activity to serve locals needs; getting the right people round the table, agreeing trade-offs and abiding by rules; and dealing with NIMBYist tendencies. To each of there were just common-sensical answers.
It is fair to say that this second part of the roundtable, while picking up on a common theme of the series, namely frustration with the absence of effective (and at all inclusive) debate about the strategic planning activity at the heart of the GLA’s role, did not actually focus in the expected way on engagement with key economic actors and their strategic visions (as in Mark’s Newcastle work on Urban Futures). Nor with the scope for much enhanced indirect and mediated engagement via the London press, television and internet, as well as “community”-scale meetings. These are unfinished business to which we hope to return, after the summer
Conclusions (a retrospect on the roundtable)
This roundtable was very different from earlier ones addressing specific London Plan questions. Instead in the end it challenged the whole legally framed, top down and administratively-led mechanism that has developed in London over the last decades of Mayoral Planning.
In the particular context of the Wider South East the capacity for collaboration still seems to be limited by a sense of the London Mayor as potentially over-powerful figure, whose city still wishes to have its growing workforce housed by others – despite a meaningless rhetoric of “consuming its own smoke”. Even though no-one in the Wider South East actually does that any longer. The Wider South East on the other hand is an amalgam of many types of authority and increasingly lacks an effective regional strategy to shape which enables positive interaction with the capital. But a change of government might change all that – and there is work to be done by people such as our round-tablers in help build as better basis for that.
The second section was more about the benefits of a bottom-up approach which could give communities powers to generate innovative approaches to local and community needs – if not to make strategic decisions. Maybe there was a little of that evident in the GLA’s recent pre-Plan “engagement activity” as discussed in the second if our autumn 2023 roundtables. Whether much of that could filter through to engagement with key business sectors, or enabling meaningful debate about strategic options in the next London Plan is doubtful, however. But it is good to have the general importance of (continuing) debate in strategic planning underlined.
In both strands there was a clear requirement for better data and evaluation which as always brings us back to who provides the capacity to organize the expertise and raise the finance. It was a stimulating and challenging event, if rather better at provoking questions, and pointing up areas for improvement, than in clarifying quite how better decisions could be made
An Afterthought
Thinking further, about the first part of this roundtable in particular, we can see that there are 3 types of frameworks available (if in play to different degrees at present) for securing collaboration across units and levels of government, with different kinds of property (in theory and/or in practice):
- A comprehensive spatial hierarchy of authoritative plans – national, regional, (sub-regional), local
- in principle: this would be consistent, inclusive of indirect linkages (through markets and infrastructure), and with strong long-term rebalancing potential;
- in practice: unrealistic in terms of technical demands, vulnerable to shifts in political/institutional control beyond short term, plus major problems of compliance, especially within central government;
- A formal duty for local plan authorities to cooperate (or “align”) on key issues
- in principle: also formally consistent, and enforceable – although at risk of being rather narrow and sometimes arbitrariness;
- in practice, it has not proved easy to enforce or deploy strategically. However we are likely to see another attempt after the election;
- Ad hoc deal-making between independent actors in different sectors/areas
- in principle: short on formal authority, legitimacy and consistency of coverage/priorities etc.;
- in practice: flexible/opportunistic in areas/fields to which applied/emerges; the bases of negotiation/terms of trade-offs, though grounded in potentially more durable stakeholder interests – but dependent on a source of leadership with credible capacity to get moving, and stickability. Where the funding comes from remains unclear.
All of these deserve attention, though they are in descending order of likely consideration. Within the Wider South East, however, with its large number of authorities and convoluted geographies of connection – including the strategically significant growth corridors – the third of these might well be the most potent. In practice, funding needs may some top-down arrangements to be in place. And the availability of leadership (on or off stage) would be a key factor, which Mayors might at least contribute to.
[1] Organised by LSE London, with collaboration from London Councils
