Liberal Democrat Communities Minister, Andrew Stunnell hits the nail firmly on the head:
"A reasonable charge was put to me that I wasn’t being respectful enough of the planning profession. My point is that we have made it so professional.
"This isn’t brain surgery. This is about how you shape your community. This ought to be a community-owned occupation, not something that requires a huge overwhelming amount of technical content."
Absolutely - by allowing the creation of a monstrous professional bureaucracy, we exclude the general public, the ordinary citizen, from the process except a supplicants (and frustrated supplicants at that).
And Mr Stunnell also reminds us that the "presumption in favour of development" was included in the 1947 Act that established the planning system.
"If you go back to 1947, you find that the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act had in it a presumption in favour of development, unless material considerations dictate otherwise.
"The row now is that we’ve got a presumption in favour of sustainable development. The difference between 1947 and 2011 is not the presumption in favour of sustainable development, it’s the addition of the word sustainable."
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2 comments:
Well, planning, sustainable development and bureaucracy?
Phewee!... frustrated supplicants...?
I think you'd better add law to the mix.... and the trampling thereof by the said bureaucrats.
fwiw - An example of sustainable development by naive supplicants vs. the mendacious, conniving, peremptory, irrational and arbitrary UK Environment Agency
I should add that Environment Agency water licences are directly governed by planning law.
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