Faster should mean better

News that the UK government is to ‘fast-track’ planning applications for nuclear power stations follows shortly after a New Labour commitment that communities would be given a greater say over what is built in their areas. The Conservative opposition has also indicated that it intends to give local people more of a say on planning, and has already condemned the government’s nuclear announcement as ‘undemocratic’.

The reality is that all political parties want to give people a feeling that they are not being overrun when it comes to major developments, a worthy aspiration; it is also true that governments have duties and responsibilities that require local considerations to be bypassed when matters of national interest are at stake  — for example the strategic importance of airports to a modern economy, or the guaranteed fulfilment of predicted energy needs.

So governments in a democratic state are faced with several problems when it comes to buildings and infrastructure which are bound to disrupt the lives of those nearest to development. The first and biggest of these is how to reconcile local needs (and dislikes), stated in what I still think of as ‘local plans’, with the compelling local, regional or national needs which have arisen since those plans were approved.

Second, how do you deal with the fact that, as all opinion polls show, the one thing which unites individuals and communities is a dislike of major construction on their doorstep? (Or minor projects – look at the fuss in Falmouth over Rick Stein’s plan for a fish and chip restaurant.) And third, how can one begin to reconcile more consultation with faster and more certain planning outcomes?

This government has partly grasped the nettle by creating the Infrastructure Planning Commission to deal with difficult big applications. The Conservatives say they will get rid of it, but then they said they would hold a referendum on the EU constitution. Changing one’s mind is one of the few luxuries Her Majesty’s Opposition enjoys, and a change does confirm that there is a mind at work.

There remains the problem of democracy not only being part of the process, but of being seen to be so. Put simply, if there is any serious risk of a major infrastructure project being turned down under the new arrangements, then it will not be submitted. It therefore follows that applications submitted will almost always be approved, thereby fuelling the paranoia of local and other single-interest pressure groups who have an aversion to almost anything from a local supermarket to a a nuclear power station, however necessary or desirable they may be for a wider public.

Curiously, the self-same people often have a sentimentalised love of anything large-scale – provided it is old. So the Victorian railway termini in central London, which ripped the heart out of local communities and shunted thousands of paupers onto the street, are admirable objects from fine people. Try demolishing a 19th century hotel to make sense of the same infrastructure today and you are hit by a wave of righteous indignation which would be funny if it were not so unreflective.

There is, however, a lesson the Victorian taught us which seems to have been forgotten in relation to major projects and the way they are implemented: the Act of Parliament. Few of those railways and stations would have been possible without direct intervention by government, establishing routes, making compulsory land purchases and so on. Some may remember the way this principle was absorbed into planning legislation via Special Development Orders, which in effect made Parliament the supreme planning committee for significant proposals.

Have we lost sight of the importance of Westminster in the welter of nimbyist localism that now besets us? This is not about the Man in Whitehall Knowing Best, but about where democracy truly lies in respect of (for example) the energy supply buildings we will need for our hospitals, homes and everything else; time is not on our side.