And so to Haywards Heath where I have spent the last couple of weeks observing stage 1 of the Local Plan Examination for Mid Sussex District Council.
Much of the talk, as is always the way at the early stages of the local plan process, has been on the duty to co-operate. Particularly with its neighbours Crawley and Horsham. Mid Sussex is also in a Housing Market Area with the Coastal West Sussex authorities in addition to Brighton and East Sussex. That area is constrained not least by the South Downs National Park running straight through the middle of it and of course the sea to the South.
Document H5 – Mid Sussex Council
The figures are pretty startling, the unmet housing need for Brighton and Hove is around 17,000 homes and the unmet need for Crawley is around 7,500 over the lifetime of their plans. This is certainly not to say that Mid Sussex should take that unmet need but it does give the council a huge task in demonstrating to the inspector examining the plan that they have complied with the Duty to Cooperate. We have seen many times before how the Duty to Cooperate can be fatal in the local plan process, most recently at Oxford City Council where the inspector brought things to a hault on the basis that the Duty to Cooperate had not been met. This is not a criticsm of MSDC or any of the LPAs involved in the Local Plan process, instead it is a realisation that they have been handed an almost impossible task and are faced with the prospect of coming to a local plan examination not knowing whether they have passed the requirements of DTC or not.
All this talk of Crawley during the examination reminded me that back in 1979 a bunch of school friends from Crawley formed what is (in my opinion anyway) one of the greatest bands this country ever produced. The Cure. Robert Smith is probably one of the greatest lyricists who ever lived and the poetic lines of songs like The Forest (“It’s always the same. I’m running towards nothing, again and again and again”) mean as much to me now when thinking about planning applications and local plan examinations as they did to a certain moody teenager lying on his bed some 30 years ago. 1 November 2024 marks the release of the Cure’s new album ‘Songs of a Lost World’ (the first since 2008) and having listened to it all this morning, it is an absolute belter! One song on the album ‘a Fragile Thing’ is a haunting song and in a recent interview lead singer of The Cure Robert Smith said it was “driven by the difficulties we face in choosing between mutually exclusive needs…..”. I mean that is DTC in a nutshell isn’t it?
But planning is a Fragile Thing and we (as planners) and the whole industry in fact, needs it to be much less fragile if the sector is to have the confidence and ability to move to the kinds of delivery and investment which Labour want (in fact need!). Many very clever people, (here, here, here, and here) and less clever people like me, have been calling for a better way of doing this for years. The answer is obvious. A return to strategic planning.
That is why the report from Radix Big Tent (Beyond the Permacrisis – Delivering 1,000 homes a day) released last month, is so important. The report uses the sad case of the breakdown in the Oxfordshire Plan as an example of the lesson learnt from the failure of the DTC. The report references the government commitment to universal strategic plan coverage which sets out a commitment in the short term to:
• retain the duty to co- operate but introduce a more robust approachto testing local plans in relation to cross boundary co-operation through the examination process;
• work with mayoral combined authorities to explore extending their powers to develop a Strategic Development Strategy (SDS) (only a small number currently have strategic planning powers); and
• identify priority groupings of other authoritieswhere strategic planning – and, in particular, the sharing of housing need, would provide particular benefits. It will engage directly with these authorities and “structure and support this co- operation, using powers of intervention as and where necessary”.
The report makes a number of very key recommendations, one of which is to:
Restore a mandatory approach to Strategic Planning at the sub- regional/city region level to support the plan-led system and free up planners for spatial planning rather than regulatory development management functions.
The thrust of 'freeing up planners for spatial planning' is the important part in my opinion here. So much time is clearly spent in the run up to examinations on DTC which could be better used elsewhere and in any event much of that work has all too often been set aside in favour of town hall politics. Something has to change.
So my friends, your homework this week is to read the Radix Big Tent report and listen to the new album by The Cure. In fact why not do both at the same time? They are both excellent and very worthy of your attention.
AB
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