Role of Planning

Role of Planning in Place Meeting

I very much welcome this debate. I think that planning is something that impinges on everybody’s lives and I’ve actually seen petitions coming in where more people have signed the petition in a council area than voted in the previous council election. It really does—it’s an issue that gets to people. I don’t think that anybody who’s sat as a Councillor would not be able to tell you of the literally hundreds of letters they’ve had, and petitions, opposing a planning development somewhere or other. 554
Of course, until 1948, or 1 July 1948, you could build what you liked where you liked as long as you owned the land. And that was a major success. I often speak very highly of the 1945-51 Labour Government, but that was another one of its successes—one of the ones that is less heralded but probably has had as much of an effect on people’s lives as anything apart from the health service—when owners could just build what they liked where they liked as long as they owned the land. We’ve got to remember there’s still land today that had use prior to 1948 where that right still exists, it hasn’t been extinguished, and every time the local development plan or the old county plan goes there, they keep that in. There was land in Swansea East that was designated for coal duff pre 1948, and they kept that planning permission until the 1990s and it was only extinguished when the land was used for housing development.555
I recognise that high-quality, well designed developments and places are essential to the long-term health and well-being of the people of Wales, but we also need transportation. There are estates built continually—and I can think of one in Rebecca Evans’s constituency, I can think of one in my own—that are almost isolated in terms of public transport. If you haven’t got a car, you’re in trouble. 556
We need homes to be built. We need industrial and commercial development. Can I just praise something the Welsh Government did well before I came here, which was the Swansea Vale development, which was a Welsh Development Agency and Swansea council development where housing, commercial and industrial development have been built in the same area very successfully? If you drive through it, you probably wouldn’t know about some of the industrial development and commercial development because they’re down little side streets and they are all well covered with trees to such an extent that, unless you know where you’re going, you wouldn’t know what was down there.557
Of course, we have the major planning dichotomy: local residents oppose a development; the landowner wants the development—the land is going to make people large sums of money. The planning committee decides. If it ended there, residents would generally be happy. While other local government decisions can go to the ombudsman, can go to judicial review, planning decisions have this intermediate step. I’ve never understood why we need this intermediate step of a planning inspector. They come in, they make decisions, they don’t know the area—they make decisions that are quite often baffling. They allow developments that cause serious problems. They don’t have to come again. They don’t have to live with the problems they’ve created. A little problem in the ward I used to represent—a single house was knocked down and it had enough room for two houses. They built three. The three houses have never been sold. So, I think it really is very important that we do have decisions made locally. I would abolish planning inspectors tomorrow if it was up to me. There’s no rhyme or reason for them, and I don’t know anybody who would actually—[Interruption.]—actually can argue why is that. They’re an intermediate step, which—judicial review, if you don’t like it.558
As a county councillor, like others here, I was involved in creating a county structure plan that designated land for different uses. The district councils then produced district plans, similar to the current local development plans. Areas could be designated across the county for housing, but others could be designated for forestry or mining at that time. So, you designated areas so you knew what was happening in each area. Individual councils are too small; the county councils were, in many respects, too small for making decisions on that regional basis. That’s why I support decisions made on the city regions and north and west Wales regions because that would mean that we have this integration. This isn’t something that Alun Davies wants to merge, actually, but a development at Trostre had a serious effect on retail in Swansea—[Interruption.]—a serious problem with retail in Swansea. So, I think it really is important.559
Can I just turn to Plaid Cymru on their view? I think it really is important that the Welsh language is treated exactly the same as the environment and, instead of technical advice notes, we have a language impact assessment, in the same way as you have an environmental impact assessment. I would hope that that is something that people would look at. See how the language—. There’s a difference between building 200 houses in Caernarfon and building 200 houses in Chepstow in the sense of the effect it has on the language. I know what Caernarfon’s like. I’ve spent a substantial amount of time there, and it’s one of the places where Welsh is spoken by so many people that it becomes the natural language of the community. I speak Welsh most of the time when I’m in Caernarfon, because it’s the language of the community. I think, when you’ve got 75 per cent to 80 per cent of the population speaking the language, it becomes the community language. When you’ve got under 50 per cent, you know that the chances are that, when you speak to somebody, they won’t speak Welsh so people don’t go ahead with it.560
And I’d just finally say that I’d love to hear an argument for why we need planning inspectors—why judicial review and the ombudsman, which is good enough for every other decision made by local authorities, isn’t good enough for planning