Planning our environment
For over five years since I first became a county councillor in Oxfordshire I've been at the forefront of trying to ensure that there is real local participation in decisions about spatial planning i.e. how we plan for the long-term for our area. As an MP I am unable to get involved in individual planning applications.
Unfortunately, our current planning system makes local participation difficult. Local residents are all too frequently seen as part of the problem and not part of the solution. That was certainly the case in relation to the attempt by Oxford City Council and the South East Regional authorities to plan for 4,000 houses on the Green Belt at Grenoble Road to the south of the city.
Amongst some, there is a belief that local people cannot make rational decisions on how they want their area to develop. So they are caricatured as NIMBYs. But as the Oxford Green Belt debate has shown, objections to this massive urban extension to Oxford were based both on principle and on technical grounds.
The principle is that the Green Belt still has a real value in protecting both cities and their rural hinterlands from the effects of urban sprawl, more congestion, more carbon emissions and a reduced quality of life. The technical grounds are that urban extensions such as that proposed for Oxford have big questions of sustainability hanging over them and in some cases prevent sustainable solutions being developed for local villages in the surrounding areas.
The Government is not contesting the judicial review case brought by CPRE and SODC that in Oxford's case it failed to carry out assessments of reasonable alternatives. Whilst this is welcome, it still leaves a need for a fundamental reform of the planning system away from a culture of centrally-imposed targets to one of bottom-up engagement in shaping local development.
Without this reform, the very notion that development can bring benefits at all will become lost and that will raise serious issues for the longer term of the viability of all our communities.
Photo acknowledgement: Jo Cartmell
