#89: A Planning System to Address the Climate and Housing Crises, with Shaun Spiers

[00:00:00] There's a sentence in the report England's Planning System has a curious void where its spatial direction should be. The Planning System has become a mechanism for development control, rather than placemaking a new development.

[00:00:11] It has not been muskered enough to direct growth to the right locations, rather it has let it happen where objections are fused. Welcome to the Green Urbanist, Podcast for Urbanist, Fighting Climate Change. I'm Ross.

[00:00:32] Hello everyone, welcome back to another episode. Today's episode is a conversation with Shaun Spears. Yeah, I'm Shaun Spears. I'm Executive Director of Green Alliance, which is a think tank working for ambitious leadership on the environment.

[00:00:55] Topic of our conversation, Senses around a publication by Green Alliance titled Build Up The Environmental Case for New Homes in Sustainable Locations.

[00:01:05] So in this conversation we really pulled together the threads of the English Planning System, the Housing Crisis that we're facing here, and also the environmental implications of how we build homes, where we build them, in what form, et cetera.

[00:01:20] We recorded this episode quite a few months ago, actually. But I'm publishing it now because we have a new government here in the UK. We have a labor government who have come in pushing for a lot of planning reform.

[00:01:34] They're already starting to look at reforming, planning, like the National Planning Policy Framework, et cetera. A lot of what labor is proposing to is really about reducing restrictions, planning restrictions and trying to get more house building happening.

[00:01:50] Shaun makes the case in this conversation and in the report that actually does not really how these things work.

[00:01:58] And then what we really need is we want to get the right outcomes for sustainability, and in terms of solving the housing crisis is we need more planning, not less.

[00:02:07] And as he says what we need is a more muscular planning system that can look strategically and plan for these things and tie together transport with housing delivery, with other uses and infrastructure which is sadly just missing here in the UK.

[00:02:22] So I think quite an interesting conversation to listen to while all this talk of planning reform is happening here in the UK in England. And I hope you'll be fine to interesting. Big thanks for showing for joining me for the conversation.

[00:02:37] Just saying general, I know I've been sort of off the airwaves for the last couple of months. Been very busy doing other stuff but now life has opened up slightly now and I'm planning more episodes on getting more guests on to do interviews.

[00:02:51] So hopefully you should get some more regular episodes coming up in the next couple of weeks and months. So yeah, look forward to hearing from you. Let me know what you thought this episode.

[00:03:03] You can access links to the report and the Green Alliance website in the episode description. There's a link in there. There's also a link to a contact form so you can email me directly and I'd love to hear your thoughts. Thanks very much.

[00:03:19] Fantastic. So we wanted to talk today in particular about Green Alliance's report build up which came out last December. And yeah, just tell me where's this come from? What was the motivation behind it and what's it about in general?

[00:03:32] It's a slightly odd thing for Green Alliance who've done. We haven't done a lot of work on planning a little bit of work, but we not a lot. And my colleague Zoe Averson who's now left Green Alliance and joined the civil service Zoe asked do the report.

[00:03:46] I have kind of incredibly bright policy advisors and policy analysts. She teamed up with PriceStout the, as well as the clue is in the name. The campaign to get more housing, particularly if you younger people who funded the report.

[00:04:04] So it was relatively unusual collaboration. It was an interesting one for me because I had been at the campaign to protect rural England and CPRE for many years.

[00:04:12] And I don't say we always saw I'd like with PriceStout. But when I was absolutely clear on is that we need to build lots more housing. So what is so the full title of the report is build up the environmental case for new homes in sustainable locations.

[00:04:30] So you're obviously taking quite an environmental viewpoint of new housing. And I think sometimes people feel delivering the hundreds of thousands of homes a year that we need.

[00:04:40] He's quite a contradictory sort of environmental aims and the drive for net zero. So what how do you sort of pull those things together? Yeah, I think we're not going to achieve environmental aims in net zero and restoring nature unless you carry people with you.

[00:04:52] So if you've got a major failing of the state of society, which is poor housing, poor quality housing, too many people living in poor quality housing, too many young adults having to live at home.

[00:05:03] Because they can't afford housing, too many people spending far too much on rent or having smaller and rented accommodation because they can't afford big more space etc.

[00:05:15] Then you need to do something. And the question is what do you do? And labor at the moment are making great play of bulldozing planning which is kind of fine as a slogan and presumably works well in focus groups.

[00:05:27] But it's really not enough. You need to know how are you going to build these homes that the country needs in ways that don't cause huge damage to the environment that don't increase our carbon emissions?

[00:05:43] And so on and the answer to that is more planning, not less, and a focus of development on existing urban areas rather than allowing sprawl into the countryside.

[00:05:53] And I was really pleased that we managed to get a report where although priceouts had a disclaimer on it, they didn't agree with the centralcy of spatial planning as one of the recommendations of the report.

[00:06:05] Nevertheless, I think they did broadly endorse the thrust of the report which is to build up in urban areas, which is where people want to live where the jobs are.

[00:06:15] And we know also there are kind of carbon benefits there in terms of heating the international planning panel climate change has said that I identify compact cities as an important way to mitigate climate change.

[00:06:31] You get less car use, you get more efficient heating and so on. So all makes sense.

[00:06:37] You do a really good job in the report, in the front part of using these incredible statistics just paying to picture for people of how how difficult the housing crisis is at the moment in the UK.

[00:06:49] And I pulled out a few of them so I was just looking through earlier and says the average home, the cost of an average home in 1997 was 3.5 times average earnings.

[00:07:01] Now that is 9.1 times, so it's 9 times your average earnings for an average house. That's just incredible rise and really not that much amount of time at all.

[00:07:11] Yeah, exactly and also the amount of space occupied by each private rent has fallen from 3.34.1 square meters in 1996 to 28.6 square meters in 2018.

[00:07:22] So much less space to have your stuff and to have a decent life which I think we particularly felt in lockdown when people were turning their homes and flats into offices certainly I felt that we call it a green alliance.

[00:07:39] Not all of that is down to supply. I've never believed that there's a sort of simple causal relationship between supply and price and governments have liked house price inflation.

[00:07:53] They've seen it as a way to win elections, new labour, funded lot of their programs out of rising value of StamptuT and so on.

[00:08:04] I think it's now got to stage where I think everybody realizes that we just need to build more homes and we need to control house price inflation. So we have a under supply issue and we have a price issue and they're related but they're also distinct as opposed.

[00:08:22] I think so. Yeah, I don't really really clear causal relationship because also housing is a sort of investment and so in a lot of people have lots of houses or because one bigger house is so I don't think it's and every country in the world and it's big cities New York Berlin, Paris London within the UK Manchester as well.

[00:08:45] There are house price inflation that's not clearly linked to supply and also there's no relationship with the supply there's not direct causal relationship.

[00:08:56] Interesting, yeah I mean you mentioned that in the report as well around just how much of our economy is tied up in housing and rising house prices and what was it the amount the amount of money tied up in housing rose from 1.6 trillion in 1995 to 8.1 trillion in 2020.

[00:09:13] So we have a lot of people who are not in housing house prices and encourage people to invest money in property rather than a more productive activities. So this is like a real economic conundrum of how do we sort of untangle all of those?

[00:09:25] Yeah, exactly and it's a cultural conundrum as well. Our people have assessed by housing and house prices because it's the way to make money or to fund their retirement or is it this sort of cultural thing of the Englishman's home is as castle and so on and I

[00:09:45] Books have been written on this but not by me. So let's get back to planning so I'm really interested to hear you know the English planning system is I think quite strange internationally when you compare to other

[00:09:58] how other countries do planning what what is the connection between our current planning system and the housing crisis? I think there's a sentence in the report England's planning system has a curious void where its spatial direction should be and this is the

[00:10:13] I suppose the lack of well again I'll read from the report the planning system has become a mechanism for development control rather than place making a new development.

[00:10:23] It has not been muscular enough to direct growth to the right locations rather it has let it happen where objections are fused. So this is directly a call for active muscular planning to make places better to identify land if necessarily in this state to compulsory purchase them.

[00:10:43] It's not in this report but in my book I think I got this from the planning association and the QNS but the price that the when Milton Keynes was first developed land contributed around 1% to the cost of new homes because

[00:11:03] Buckhamshire County Council protect the countryside of Buckhamshire decided to build a new town in Milton Keynes now city. That's unimaginable now that you'd have that kind of confidence from the centre right to say to land owners we're not going to give you the uplift in land value.

[00:11:21] So we know there's a massive increase in the value that land owners get if they get planning permission. I don't think we'll ever get to a stage nor should we where you could partially purchase simply agricultural values which was church or proposals as a rule or an incredibly.

[00:11:39] We're going to be a general confidence in an active state but you can complicit land owners decently for developing their land for housing.

[00:11:50] So they make a reason return but not a kind of 10 or 20 or 100 times the value of the land stands without planning permission and that's been one of the problems that's one of the reasons for rising land costs has been the whole. Just doing nothing about land values.

[00:12:10] The whole business of urban development corporations building new towns, property planning urban extensions etc. We've kind of lost that confidence in the last 40 years and there's just been a sense over the market will provide but clearly the market hasn't provided.

[00:12:24] What do you think is the role of local authorities getting back into building social housing affordable housing etc.

[00:12:34] It's really interesting when it's not because you need a sort of massive recovery of the ability of local authorities to do things including local authority planning departments that have been stripped away and consistently cut.

[00:12:49] So I think most local authorities have lost their ability to build a new house. Some have it in some of building council houses and they provide a good return. There's money if you made out of property so they provide a good return for the right pair.

[00:13:05] But I think it'll be slow process and whether you do it through directly through local authorities or through housing associations. I guess we'll be something that a future government will consider.

[00:13:16] What I don't think you can do is leave it to the kind of oligopoly of big house builders. And there's a very interesting book whose title I've just forgotten because by Toby Lloyd and others we think in the economic economics of housing I think so and other.

[00:13:34] But which talks about the relationship between the small and medium sized enterprise builders small builders and. And so this is the local council provision so when we were building lots of council houses that provided SME builders with a constant stream of work.

[00:13:55] During low times when there was a recession or interest rates were higher. And they could they they survive those dips and housing crises.

[00:14:07] What happened in the last 40 years since we stopped building council houses is that when there's a recession those SME builders have just gone out of business and so it's increasingly left to. And they have absolutely no interest in building on the scale that we need.

[00:14:28] Or in the locations of what the urban forms that we need perhaps. Yeah, yeah it is a curious thing because it does feel like I think we do.

[00:14:37] We do often point the blame at both large house builders and local authorities when we see you know low density suburban homes built in the countryside no connection to.

[00:14:47] Local area no train station anything like that and we think how could they let this happen but it's interesting to think of it as a it's an outcome of a planning system that that sort of encourages that kind of behavior.

[00:14:58] In in the way that you know it's very it's very opportunistic it's very market driven and there's very little actually to push. Developers to build in more sustainable locations or local authorities to have the teeth to actually force them to do so or to refuse unsustainable development.

[00:15:23] So we talked a little bit I think. I think I'm just wondering in terms of listenership, I think some people who be listening will be based in England probably work in the blind system all the time some people probably be less familiar with it.

[00:15:38] So I think maybe just give a bit of an overview.

[00:15:41] I think what we're saying is that we had a more of a strategic spatial direction in planning up until about 10 is that right and then we got rid of the sort of county level spatial plans that were sort of trying to knit together development before then the county level went before then I'm pretty sure.

[00:16:02] But what went in 2010 was the regional level so got it regional planning was an attempt to join up transport planning employment housing and so on energy infrastructure which is going to be increasingly important. The regions were considered to be. The lack democratic legitimacy.

[00:16:27] Kind of can't was joined with oxygen. There was no reals with a whole of the middle for London. There's no real sense that people lived in regions the most.

[00:16:36] Hemgienius region arguably was the northeast small region strong cultural identity but then it was the northeast that rejected regional planning in its original government and it's referendum quite early in the. In the new labor times and then the regional planning never got back is democratic legitimacy after that.

[00:16:56] Wow that's so interesting is that big push for localism in the idea that actually we can just solve these things at a much smaller spatial scale.

[00:17:03] Yeah and and some of that localism I'd really welcome I think what the conservatives did in 2010 when they came in with with neighborhood planning I mean they're planning is.

[00:17:13] Is great and there are some good examples of it really working but it's not in the context of all what either spatial plan. And it's not just housing the whole you know we we have a messed up transport system we we have.

[00:17:28] We we have no real connection between transport and planning it the labor again want to be a lot of new towns but how can you do that just through the prison of the town of country planning actually you and and local authorities.

[00:17:45] You will need to create urban development corporations you will need to plan the transport for those places ideally you'll be public transport to fund the public transport you need. Land value capture so that you can fund. Public transport links if you're building.

[00:18:04] New towns or or garden cities or whatever they're going to call them then you need to have employment for people living there unless they just all the three towns you know you kind of need to think about all this and not just say.

[00:18:14] Local is always right and the other thing is understandably local people people who have a stake in the area don't necessarily see the benefit of new development they're in the area because they like the area.

[00:18:25] And they're kind of risk of earth so at some point you need to engage with those people I know that better than most having work for C. very.

[00:18:32] And you need to engage with them you need to try and get consent I think you can't can get that if you do it properly but at the end of the day you can't get them a veto you know there is a there are times so.

[00:18:44] The sort of principle of planning is that it's a great system for reconciling local and national long term short term social economic environmental it it it kind of melts all those things together and comes out with.

[00:19:00] And I come that is in the public interest but not necessarily in any one sectional interest so it's difficult stuff and it's very, very political and the idea that it's you can make it a 10 degree exercise is also deluded.

[00:19:15] Yeah well yeah absolutely I mean I think having having sort of gone through university where.

[00:19:22] I suppose we're taught the sort of technical aspects of planning and urban design in terms of you know we sort of know we've known for decades what is sort of what is this sort of you know.

[00:19:31] And then you sort of get into the real world and you realize actually this is just so caught up in politics in economics and who's benefiting from the current system and all these all these things what which just what makes it so difficult to on tangled.

[00:19:51] But it's what's interesting is that lots of other countries seem to do it much better than us. Do you have any thoughts on that any examples. And there are some great examples in there. And obviously, every country is different. But the card depends, the Atlanta and Barcelona

[00:20:09] has offered compared. The report talks about Barcelona's sort of eye-watersing density, parts of Barcelona with 50,000 people per square kilometer. And it says that the most dense part of London is less than 20,000, which is made available, which is actually pretty deserase area. Barcelona, of course, is a humming city

[00:20:30] that people want to visit and live in. So yeah, there are good examples. I went years ago to Voban in Freiburg. It's slightly unfortunate that there's a steady stream of planners and urbanists and sectoral going to Voban.

[00:20:50] You would like to think there was an example in the UK by now, where you're 30 years of coach trips there. But that's all households within 400 meters of a tram stop was the plan. The report gives the example of the Stockholm loop,

[00:21:06] which aims to build 125,000 houses close to 12 public transport stops in the city suburbs with 50% reduction in car use per dwelling. And there will be good examples from the UK. There are some good developments in the UK as well. But you do need to carry people with you.

[00:21:25] And this was the problem, Labor's or actually, I didn't even say Labor. I think it was introduced by John Gummer under the major government, but PPG three policy guidance, no three, which recommended a densities, every densities of 30 to 50 to addings per hectare,

[00:21:42] was considered by many to be kind of high rise. People just thought, I remember talking to local counsellors about it, but I was a CPIrier. I thought, no, we can't possibly have densities in that size. There's a great book by my former colleague,

[00:21:55] Mick Scone, called I'm so bad with names. It's great book by Mick Scone. Where he sits down with planners from around Davis, including Martin Crookston, he was later on the task force. And plots out how you could build kind of a really attractive

[00:22:16] mixed use housing at 50 dwellings per hectare on a family homes and on a square with a garden in the middle of a bit like the developers in Koyen Street. Some single apartment, some family homes, looking quite attractive, three story, you can do this stuff.

[00:22:34] But you need to plan it. You need to do it well. And you don't need to just do the cookie cutter states that you see now sprawling all over England. Yeah, and I think to that point,

[00:22:45] maybe one final statistic from me just because I found them so helpful for illustrate the point. But it was between 2011 and 2019, only 17% of new homes were built in well connected neighborhoods within a 10 minute walk of a train station, 17% like what an absolute failing of spatial planning.

[00:23:07] So I think we've sort of laid out what is, as for some of these issues. Can I just say, sorry to interrupt, but that's 70% is a shocking statistic. It's 70% in London. We end here as an area that does have a spatial plan because the mayor has created power.

[00:23:24] So that again shows what you can do. Another example in the report is of Coventry, which except for a single square kilometre in the centre of the city, has a density standard of 35 buildings per hectare, which, you know, spite of there being lots of suburban train stations

[00:23:42] with routine coventry aluminum or whatever. So we are planning for sprawling low density development. Yeah, yeah, exactly. So might be a good time to get on to some of the recommendations that are in the report. What would you do for the planning system in the sense?

[00:24:01] Well, strategic spatial plans is, for cities is one strengthening the MPPF on transport or into development is another. There is perhaps a more controversial recommendation about allowing local development orders for suburban areas. I think there has to be in the context of a kind of clear

[00:24:28] spatial plan, but easing the need for planning permission to develop around stations in suburban areas. All this stuff will need to be properly interrogated. I know there are stations in the London Greenbelt where you kind of frequently see them in presentations, but people want to build over them,

[00:24:56] where they just kind of a nice state of station surrounded by horses who just are parking exit and it looks bonkers, why don't you build lots of development around there? In some cases that would be appropriate. In other cases, actually the idea that all the people who live

[00:25:10] in the development of the station are just going to commute in the Netherlands. Of course they won't. They'll want to get to other places, they'll want to car, they'll want schools in the medical services shops. So you will get sprawling what is currently open countryside,

[00:25:26] which is the point of the Greenbelt. So we need to be careful how we do it, but I think we've all go to suburban areas where you'll see a railway station and it's not very pleasant, but there's a sprawling low level development,

[00:25:46] not really able to sustain any shops. You could make that a great place to live, a real hub with a bit of imagination. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think the local development order is aspect. It reminds me in a sense of what's happening at the moment with design codes.

[00:26:07] Design coding has really come into the forefront in planning in the UK, almost well in England. Almost seemingly as a hoping to solve all of our problems in a sense of sort of that's going to be the new practice planning thing,

[00:26:20] which is that local authorities are going to put together a design code for their whole area. And then that's going to make the development control aspect of planning much more straightforward and consistent. I think having spoken to lots of local authority officers

[00:26:34] about this, it's nowhere near going to be as simple as that and we don't really have the skills in the public sector at the moment to really do this. Yes. But it seems like that ties in quite well to this idea of local development orders.

[00:26:49] Yes, I think all this stuff needs to be in the context of design code and in the context of a spatial plancy, so it's not a free-fruir. So again, one of the recommendations that report is to is to experimentally, so it's with street votes

[00:27:09] where residents in given an area can vote on eating planning controls and people have extensions or redevelop their houses. But with a design code, so the area improves rather than not. So yes, I think I'm in favour of design code.

[00:27:33] Design code to a kind of swept away when the MPPF was brought to a national planning policy framework by the coalition government. And that was all attempt to really really simplify planning and they go away. They did away also with supplementary planning orders and so on.

[00:27:51] But planning is a hard thing to simplify. Planning is complex. Creating the places we want to live in is complex. And I think anybody goes around and looks at the quality of some new developments would really think, you know, do need some design codes.

[00:28:08] I just would hope that they are imaginative. One of the things I do when I write my book was visit custom-built cell-bill housing in Amsterdam. I saw the kind of most wonderful modern funky homes you could imagine.

[00:28:24] And then went to a cell-bill development in the UK, which was just looked like just another of Barrett's estate. And I think we can do better. Well, I would hope so. You have an interesting part of the report, which is about why retaining existing buildings

[00:28:46] is not always the most environmentally beneficial thing to do and that there can be an argument for a demolition densify approach. Yes, and this is my colleague Zoe, who's the lead author of the report, who was a Greenland policy analyst and therefore loves facts and data.

[00:29:08] And I think the argument is clear that although we are all increasingly concerned by embodied carbon and by the climate cost of giving building short life spans, if you replace sort of low density dwellings with many more dwellings on the same footprint,

[00:29:34] then in a relatively short period of time you do get a carbon saving. Again, I think it needs to be site-specific in these, and we need to consider the heritage and cultural aspect.

[00:29:44] So I'm a great fan of reusing the flats in some of the old mills around Manchester, our fantastic deserous places. The charity saves, say, Britain's heritage has done brilliant work on trying to repurpose ground existing buildings and keeping the body carbon but also keeping the character

[00:30:07] of the area. So I'm certainly not a argument for sweeping away heritage. I think we always need to think carefully about how we reuse one of low buildings because people

[00:30:17] like the character in an area. But it's not a cleansing argument, you do need to look at every aspect of it. Yeah, I think something that I really feel has happened in the last couple of years

[00:30:27] within the built environment professions is that I think architects and engineers have been extremely good at moving forward with best practice guidance and research and recommendations around how to achieve net to your carbon or how to drastically reduce missions within the sort of

[00:30:46] building, looking at individual buildings. And I think once you move beyond buildings to a place-based analysis, it becomes so much more complex and much more difficult actually to calculate things accurately but also just wasting things. So I think it's absolutely necessary. It really needs to

[00:31:05] happen. So I think taking that thing of looking at, you know, use the example in the report of if you have 50, you know, semi-detached homes by a train station, you know, what's the most

[00:31:15] environmentally beneficial thing to do there? Is it to continue the sprawl into the surrounding area or is it to, you know, redevelop those 50 homes into 300 apartments and, you know, once you start adding in the transport of missions, the lifestyle of missions, the, maybe the ability to make the

[00:31:37] homes more environmentally friendly in the operation than the previous homes where, you know, once you start adding all these things up, you start to get a different picture. Then the more simplistic view I suppose we sometimes have which is just keep everything we have, you know, as much

[00:31:51] as possible. Yeah, as you think that is interesting. Absolutely. And I also think that you can, if you build well, you'll improve the character of the area. A lot of these homes are not particularly

[00:32:01] visually attractive. I know we have to be careful about that because some parts of the country which are cherish now were reviled at the time they were built and saying, you know, it might,

[00:32:13] it might be the opinions or change. But there's a thing in the National Planning Policy Framework where it says that local authorities must provide, require plans to provide for new housing except where and a quite amazing need and full would be building a density significantly

[00:32:31] out of character with existing area. And there are lots of areas, particularly lots of suburbs, where the character will be improved by new year. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think that's, I think the place making aspect to this is just is really, really important as well. And this

[00:32:49] this thing of just like so much of of England is sort of, it feels like nowhere in a sense. You know, we've really lost a lot of our local character in in in in places, particularly suburban

[00:33:00] places. And I think yeah, I think we we along with the environmental and the social benefits and I think it's maybe you know, having some of these really good higher density midrise developments will start to help public opinion shift towards actually, you know, viewing those

[00:33:18] more favorably. And I think there is a lot of fear sometimes from people wanting anything as higher than two stories. They start to feel a bit like, oh, what's happening with this isn't New York,

[00:33:27] what are you doing kind of thing? Like, well, it's only, you know, we're along with that. They try to get aflating the bar because I mean, people like, yeah, it's really,

[00:33:41] I mean, I think what the other interesting thing about the report is that there are a lot of the debate, of course, is about public opposition to building in the Green Belt and sprawling

[00:33:49] into the countryside. And so that's the focus of attention. And that, of course, is what I was very involved in within CPRE. The CPRE always had a very strong urbanist tendency right from

[00:34:01] this beginning in 1926 and Tony Burton from CPRE was on regular rise of the task force and power was a great urbanist and countryside protector. And so on, but there is really also very

[00:34:13] very strong opposition to building in towns and in densities. And you see this with, I mean, the report quotes the campaign to stop building over a car park by Cock Foster's tube station,

[00:34:31] which I think was led by 300 51 homes. It was led by the neighbouring MP, Trees of Vilius. Who I like and have worked with. It's not in the report, but there was another, it was quite a lot of press coverage, was group of heart, the lay rent, he also,

[00:34:45] like, and have worked with campaigning against a development in the centre of Ealing, which is very people who live in Ealing and love Ealing, sort of said, you know, love Ealing, but it could be improved. It's not, it's not a kind of, it's not Westminster Abbey.

[00:35:00] But you get that sort of opposition in cities, as well as in the country. Start countryside. The difference is it seems we're more successful in the city. So we end up with relatively low density city centers, with really low density suburbs. And we continue to have

[00:35:19] lots of sprawling development at really dense, sort of 15 buildings per hectare in the countryside. And so that's why I might sort of manage more planning, not less, not the bulldozer planning, but plan properly. It's very interesting, I mean, even the suburbs in other countries are

[00:35:40] very different and I haven't quite figured out. I spend a fair amount of time initially. My partner is Italian and her parents live in a sort of, I suppose you call it a sort of commuter town outside

[00:35:48] of Milan about maybe 10, 20 kilometers outside of Milan. And the suburbs there are just like, you would never see the sort of 32 DPH semis, it has homes there. It's just culturally just

[00:36:00] doesn't happen. So where they live is like built in the 60s, 70s has a metro stop in the middle of the countryside, but everything is five and six story apartment blocks. And it's just like totally

[00:36:12] bathles and makes them just like what planning system was in place that that happened here. But at the same time in the UK we were we were sprawling across the countryside and it's just a fast saying sort of question of culture and history of how these things happen.

[00:36:28] It is, isn't it? And we Scotland has a different culture of certainly the cities of the tenant of blocks in Edinburgh, I think, is built more densely, but Ireland has very glad English systems. There's lots of lots of sprawling, low density development. And I guess

[00:36:46] every country is different, please. Approach. Before we move on to talking about your book, which I guess we've touched on some points on already, is there anything else from the report you want to bring up? Well it's, I suppose maybe it's implicit what I've said,

[00:37:05] but you talk about the recommendations and one of the recommendations is to strengthen the powers of local authorities to regenerate and develop their areas. So it is, you start off by saying where they capable of building houses themselves and I think that's something we should aspire to.

[00:37:23] It might take a bit of time, but we should also really aspire to strengthen local planning authorities and the confidence of local areas to plan, possibly starting with the metronome airs who've

[00:37:35] got more who've got larger scale. I look my own local planning off of my own local planning authorities. It's got enough problems. I'm not sure it's going to be really, very well equipped

[00:37:47] to do this quickly, but we're going to have to get there and to be honest, labors plan to create an extra 300 planning offices is really not worth talking about. And that's less than one planning officer per local authorities going to need a real investment in planning and planners

[00:38:10] to enable better place-making. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's not a hard problem to sort of analyse when you just see how much budgets have been caught, how many less, how much planning departments have really suffered and hollowed out over the last couple of years. And I think

[00:38:32] yet any aspiration to a more active and proactive planning system obviously has to have funding attached to it. But presumably that all pays for itself many times over in terms of reduced emissions, you know, greater health and well-being in the population from having healthier

[00:38:47] places, you know, all of these things. It must be an incredibly good investment for the government's make. Yeah, I think so. Provided the planning system allows local authorities to plan properly, which is the moment it doesn't. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. Okay, well that was great. Yeah,

[00:39:03] there'll be a link to the that report in the episode description and I really encourage people to go and read through it. It's very well written like it's very approachable and it's not sort of overly

[00:39:13] long or difficult to get through, which is very welcome. Yeah, let's have a chat about your book, how to build houses and save the countryside. Where did this come from? I also make sure from

[00:39:26] the cracking read. So I was a CPRE for 13 years and I said campaign for it rolling in how to kind of reputation for being nimbee for trying to stop development for knowing where it didn't want

[00:39:40] or other than where it did want. Much of it unfair and my own background kind of political background was more on the social side of the first environmental organisation I'd worked for and I certainly

[00:39:53] didn't go into it trying to stop people better in their lives and living in decent homes. And I spent, I spent a lot of time giving more or less the same speech rather than the same

[00:40:05] blog and I wanted to just take some time out to think about what could, how we could create a better planning system that really could protect the countryside, but increased development and recognizing also that countries are being lost, that more green belt was being lost,

[00:40:22] the non-green belt land, there were a lot of pressures. So how could you do this better? Not by saying no loss of countryside in this feasible, when the last Labour government had a 60% brownfield target CPRE advocated 80% brownfield target and I think one or two years that was

[00:40:43] achieved, but never advocated 100% brownfield target. So that was the book was an attempt to kind of think through my ideas and be slightly, slightly, slightly attached from CPRE so I was able to say

[00:40:59] things about how you had built in the green belt rather than just saying no building the green belt, green belt is sacred. So I'm fortunate in a way I moved to green lines halfway through

[00:41:08] right in the book, who just wanted to book was published. So it's one of the very unreadmaster pieces of our time I think. It still wanted to copy, still wanted to copy his left, but what's

[00:41:25] slightly depressing about it was published in 2018. I don't think it needs much updating. I think that's okay, you know, through all the tinkering of the planning system, the main analysis we need more

[00:41:34] planning, not less, we need take on land prices, we need to take on the oligopoly of the big builders. We need if you really care about building homes, you need to build them, we, you know,

[00:41:43] half the homes we build more than half the homes you built for 30 years, half the second wood wall would build by the state then all that was swept away in 79 council houses were sold off. But

[00:41:56] the private sector provision is more or less consistent since 2545 sometimes it's up because there's a housing boom sometimes it's down, but the private sector alone in my view will not deliver on the scale that's needed. So there's a whole lot in the book anyway so yeah that's a

[00:42:16] campfire through. When you say save the countryside what does it mean by that? I suppose yeah there's like robotic title isn't it, but save as much countryside as possible it's character and just not have sort of anodine sprawl. I use some local examples, I know

[00:42:37] even Rochester in midway, like I've quite a report I think it's either from the Institute of Economic Affairs or the University of Michigan that say that the midway is kind of joined with mainstream. Well actually it isn't, it's got part of air vaster in natural music between it

[00:42:55] and me so but it's really important to keep that kind of character that sense that you do have. You can have dense development so in midway, chat and strew, Rochester and Radem are almost

[00:43:13] merged and I think there's some people want them to be made a city, the city or midway. But around those four towns there's wonderful countryside that's the real midway, there's marshland, the north-downs and that matters. Yeah yeah absolutely I mean do you have any thoughts

[00:43:35] I mean we're probably getting a bit off topic here but I just think there's there's a really fascinating thing happening I think over the coming decades around how our countryside may be changing

[00:43:45] the character of it and how we make use of land as things like nature recovery comes much further up the agenda even things like rewilding or nature restoration at large scale is becoming much more

[00:43:57] I suppose promoted and accepted by people and even things like solar power wind farms forestry you know all there's all these sort of environmental land juice aspects that I think are now starting to sort of shift maybe how we traditionally would use land and land has always

[00:44:19] changed isn't it the kind of hatreds which we now love were brought in my enclosures which yeah people railed against in the 18th century and CPRE Rutland was set up to stop the building

[00:44:35] Rutland water it's main purpose now is to protect like Rutland water and kind of wonderful immunity for these midlands which it is I remember the campaigns at CPRE against badly cited product polytiles and there are issues around polytiles and and at home's rank cultural

[00:44:55] workers and so on but we've increased the soft food season massively and I'm kind of growing strawberries and raspberry over logacies and I know pass by lots of polytiles on my community London and you kind of get used to them as you get used to solar farms

[00:45:13] I'm not saying this stuff is unimportant but the landscape has always changed I think the change I think is you in the changes we're going to like to see in the next 10 years as we

[00:45:26] really step up measures to come back climate change are going to be massive we don't step up those measures then the country science is going to change because of drought and flooding and extreme extreme weather but the scale of renewable energy infrastructure particularly

[00:45:41] pylons from offshore wind but also onshore wind and solar is going to change landscapes and a lot of people are going to be really sad about that and we'll need to carry people with us

[00:45:53] but it kind of needs to happen if we're going to meet that zero yeah fantastic yeah I mean I think I really appreciate that mindset of the constant evolution and the constant change and

[00:46:04] let's just hope that you know I think the reality is once you sort of study the ecology of Britain is that we actually live in a very we live in one of the most ecologically deprived

[00:46:15] countries in the world and so you know what we can do in terms of reforcing, renaturizing, rewilding, private Britain will be hopefully it will it will be a different aesthetic than we're used to not the need tidy agricultural fields necessarily everywhere but hopefully

[00:46:30] in time will we'll come to love that for what it is which is you know hugely beneficial for us and for other wildlife yeah exactly and it can be done without massively would you seeing food production

[00:46:41] as well yeah so I yeah absolutely cool this has been a great chat I really enjoyed this any any final points from you or any sort of I suppose called to action for for listeners before we

[00:46:54] finish up well I think the only core fraction and it's something I'm sort of mildly obsessed with with the Labour Party Labour Party who look like they're going to win the next election have

[00:47:03] got bold plans for planning but I haven't really got a clue what they are and and the stuff I've read and I've tried quite hard to dig down suggests that they if they if they thought

[00:47:17] really deeply about it they haven't let on which I sort of understand because they've got a small target strategy doing the election the more they are clear about their policies the more

[00:47:27] people attack either attack the more or nick them so they might have a great plan for planning but at the moment the level of rhetoric is that we're going to planning has got in the way

[00:47:36] of getting the development of country needs within a sweep away the planning system and in it that narrative is so superficial it's exactly what we heard in 2010 it's the narrative of positive change the independent of the issue of economic affairs the atmosphere is to sweep away

[00:47:50] planning and all will be well and and a it gives too much credence to the idea of planning is stopping building things and what a lot of what is stopping building things are lack of skills

[00:48:05] lack of supply chains lack of diversity in the industry and so on but but also it it's almost an invitation to do things badly and and when we've done things well in this country it's being through

[00:48:21] kind of as they quite muscular planning with as much democratic consensus you can get but in the end it's the business of government both local and national to to consult to set out a vision for

[00:48:35] for better places and if they screw it up they'll learn these elections but they can't just refer to the private sector you know that you can go to a plan problem