The House of Commons Communities and Local Government Committee is currently holding an inquiry into the “Abolition of Regional Spatial Strategies”, and another into “New Localism”. A summary of my submission to the RSS inquiry is available @ http://crookbarrow.wordpress.com I was delighted to see that two local action groups concerned with green belt issues had been invited to attend this inquiry’s Committee hearings last week. Please see the website and blog for the Shortwood Green Belt Campaign – www.shortwoodgbc.co.uk – and Save the Countryside, http://savethecountryside.wordpress.com
As it happens, both these groups are based in the former South West region, in the same M5 motorway corridor as Worcester, which fell into the former West Midlands region. Strategic planning in Worcester and the West Midlands was less advanced than further south, and, as it also happens, the local South Worcestershire Joint Core Strategy has been scrapped along with the West Midlands Regional Spatial Strategy.
From the Worcester and environs perspective, SWJCS was, in fact, just as much of a problem as WMRSS because of a presumption of development around the city of the kind which has aroused so much opposition further south. SWJCS is due to be replaced by a “South Worcestershire Development Plan” – see www.swjcs.org The very title of the proposed new local plan suggests that the presumption in favour of development is likely to continue. Indeed, it may well be that South Worcestershire will be expected to absorb development pressures from further south.
This is precisely why a higher tier of strategic planning is important and the abolition of regional spatial strategies – which offered the potential for tackling strategic environmental issues such as the protection of existing green belts and the designation of new ones, around places like Worcester - must not be allowed to encourage large-scale speculative development, as is currently happening around Worcester.
My submission to the CLG Committee therefore proposes the replacement of RSSs with a “Standing Conference” of local authorities, government agencies and non-government organisations, similar to that of SERPLAN (the South East Regional Planning Conference) which existed before the introduction of heavy-handed regional planning and development bureaucracies by the previous government. These forums would work with Government Regional Offices, also a precursor of New Labour structures, to maintain the body of useful strategic research to emerge from the RSS process, such as data on the backlog of brownfield employment land in the West Midlands region.
