Do We Need a Plan for England?

Posted on: 21 June 2023 by Ian Wray in Blog

Back in the 2000s an enthusiastic Regional Development Agency chair went to visit his responsible Minister and asked if we could have a national spatial plan. The response was telling: ‘Oh, we don’t want one of those. Everybody would be able to see what we were doing’. Recently an eminent transport planner made a similarly downbeat point: ‘We are so far adrift on coherent strategic thinking (our strategy is to make it up as you go along) that a spatial plan looks like a fantasy. Maybe it’s something we could get to, after development of a set of coordinated measures’.

A Strategic Void

Currently national strategy for infrastructure and development appears to be an aching void. It is unclear whether HS2 will proceed beyond Birmingham or whether the Integrated Rail Plan (and thus Northern Powerhouse Rail) will be implemented or abandoned. Freeports seem disconnected from ports, unconnected with Investment Zones, and neither seems related to university investment. There seems to be no spatial dimension to national and public investment in R&D. The state of housing policy speaks for itself: with regional plans lost there is no guidance for house building in local plans. There is no long-term commitment to tackling the severe problems of our old industrial towns. There is no real replacement for the EU’s long term structural funds especially for the former Objective One areas. There are no large-scale new town or new city proposals, nor agencies for securing land assembly and compulsory purchase orders. Unsurprisingly our resulting regional inequalities are enormous.

Arguably a plan for England could help to fill that gap. Many other nations have national spatial plans, and it would be instructive to see what they are used for in practice[1]. Scotland would be a good case for review. At least one national infrastructure specialist is a spatial plan proponent and is said to keep a copy of the Dutch national spatial plan in his office. In truth, any national industrial or economic strategy would have a spatial component, whether explicit, or consequential, and thus implicit. The draft Industrial Strategy of November 2017 said that while we cannot do everything everywhere, we will do something everywhere. But when the strategy was finally adopted, this commitment had vanished, leaving government with no commitment to places whatsoever.

Key Issues

To get from where we are to where we might wish to be, a number of questions would need to be addressed:

  • Who would prepare a national spatial plan?
  • To achieve some stability beyond the electoral cycle, would the plan making body best be located inside or outside government?
  • How would it achieve legitimacy and traction?
  • How should the process start and how should it be reviewed?
  • Should it be statutory or advisory?
  • Should it focus on resource and investment planning priorities, or on land use planning?

A freestanding national planning institution could draw on the experience of DATAR[2], the French 1960s planning institution, which was located in the Ministry of the Interior but had direct access to the Prime Minister and was thus able to influence the spatial budget priorities of other departments of state[3]. To insulate against change every time a General Election shifts control it could perhaps be established in the Bank of England as a spatial parallel to the Monetary Policy Committee. It could be freestanding and independent like the Office of Budget Responsibility. Or it could be outside government altogether, like New York’s Regional Plan Association, which has powerfully shaped the city’s future since the 1920s[4]. Whatever the model, it should have mediating, negotiating and convening skills, alongside strategy making and research functions.

Experience in England’s former Regional Development Agencies demonstrated the importance of money. If you are trying to secure plan implementation it is incredibly helpful to have a catalytic budget. Everybody takes notice of your plan if you are bringing funds to the table, even as little as 5 or 10 percent. The French have used contrats d’axe and contrats de developpement territorial to secure development consents and commitments from local government along the route of proposed strategic rail improvements[5].

The Old Industrial Towns

It’s easy to focus on the big cities and places with obvious opportunity. But we should not neglect the 20 or so old industrial towns at the bottom of the social pile, especially as several of them are our national repositories of advanced engineering skills such as aerospace, defence and nuclear. They need a long term, two or three decade, programme, and a long term supporting institution, especially to tackle social and educational issues, with stable funding routed directly from a new ‘Wealth Fund’.

We all hope that King Charles and his heir will become active in modernising the monarchy. Perhaps that should go further than cutting costs and thinning down the ranks, by taking advantage of characteristics of the monarchy which are not always present in some of today’s politicians: integrity, convening power and the ability to think and act consistently in the long term.

As Prince of Wales, Charles had a notable success in setting up the Prince’s Trust, a charity which has done much positive work with young people and in deprived communities. Could King Charles go a step further? The Crown Estate includes ownership of the seabed out to 12 nautical miles. As offshore wind energy continues to develop in our coastal waters it will generate a huge income stream for the Crown Estate from the auctioning of seabed licences for offshore wind farms, in perpetuity[6]. The FT reported that the King had asked that profits from one particular Crown Estate wind farm deal be redirected instead to the “wider public good”[7].

Why not establish an independent Sovereign’s Wealth Fund, channelling the income from Crown Estate assets to the task of turning round the small number of communities worst hit by deindustrialisation and austerity? Working alongside these communities on environmental, social and economic projects this fund could make a real impact in the long term – at least over the next three decades. 

New Towns and Cities

Harold Wilson’s post 1968 Act new towns, like Milton Keynes and Warrington, were little short of local economic miracles, although you rarely hear about that, partly because the big cities are so powerful in advancing their own cause. In terms of total GVA % change 1997-2013 Milton Keynes came first nationally (+135.4% growth) and Warrington came 8th (+ 106.7%). Manchester, Sheffield and Leeds trailed at 18, 19, 20th (+ circa 92%) and Birmingham came 36th [8]. A full ‘ex post facto’ financial evaluation on these new towns would be interesting.

We might find that commitment to a new generation of new towns in the south would be lucrative national investments, especially if a formula could be devised to secure private investment in basic infrastructure, in return for a share of long-term leasehold income and capital gains from what would almost certainly become blue chip land holding investments.

North West Dimensions

What might the main components of a national spatial plan look like in the North West?

First it would inevitably acknowledge that the region’s greatest economic potential lies in Liverpool and Manchester city centres, the areas between, south Manchester, including Manchester Airport and Warrington/North Cheshire. The arrival of the GCHQ HQ operation in central Manchester could have profound impacts on the North West’s cyber and AI capacity. As noted, Warrington has been a huge success. The New Town Development Corporation turned Warrington from a fading industrial town to one of the fastest areas of GVA growth in the UK.

One key to capitalising on this potential is to speed up rail connections between Liverpool and Manchester and the places in between by upgrading the two existing lines through electrification, junction upgrades, signalling upgrades, selective four tracking plus an east west tunnel under central Manchester overcoming the critical Oxford Road/Piccadilly choke point[9]. This would generate enormous agglomeration economies at relatively little cost and lead to strong regeneration impulses in the deprived places between the two city centres. It would not require the billions currently in the government’s Integrated Rail Plan for HS2 Phase 2b and Northern Powerhouse Rail (figures which seem increasingly unrealistic given the parlous state of current public finances and consequent increase in government borrowing costs).

In addition, there are around a dozen old industrial towns in the region with extremely severe problems of deprivation and social malaise. It is very misleading to describe the towns as post-industrial. Several are critical repositories of national skills in advanced manufacturing, including: Barrow, mini nuclear reactors; Salmesbury/Blackburn, autonomous aircraft; Whitehaven/Sellafield, nuclear waste management; Birkenhead, naval refurbishment and shipbuilding. All the towns need a 20-30 year ‘commitment institution’, working alongside councils and business.

Short Termism to Strategy

It is difficult to believe that we could move decisively from our current obsession with short termism and ‘non-plan’ to a national vision, strategy or plan. What seems sensible to others seems like a fantasy to us.

But possibly, our current state of national disarray could provide the impetus to move forward on planning and plans and to rebuild the dwindling executive capability of the state. And, just possibly, one of our political parties may decide to pick up the gauntlet for positive state directed action, just as Attlee’s pioneering Labour government did in those days of bomb-damaged cities and huge national debt which followed the Second World War.

 

The author is grateful for helpful comments from Jim Steer.


References

[1] National Spatial Strategies in an Age of Austerity, Mark Boyle, Aileen Jones Olivier Sykes and Ian Wray, Heseltine Institute, University of Liverpool, 2018

[2] Delegation de l’Amenagement du Territoire et l’Action Regionale

[3] J. W. House, France: An Applied Geography, Methuen 1978

[4] See Ian Wray, No Little Plans, Routledge, 2019, Chapter 9, No Little Plans: Power Brokers. Business Elites and the Making of New York

[5] See the papers by Caroline Garrez and Juliette Maulat in Town Planning Review Vol 85, No 2, 2014

[6] Crown Estate: Windfarm Windfall”, Lex, Financial Times, 29 April 2023

[7] Financial Times News Report, 19 January 2023

[8] Source: ONS statistics presented in Liverpool City Region Foresight Prospectus, Alan Harding, Nicola Headlam, Richard Meegan and Brendan Nevin, Heseltine Institute, University of Liverpool, October 2015

[9] Ian Wray, David Thrower and Jim Steer, High Speed Rail in Northern England, Built Environment, Vol 46, No 3

 

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