Bristol can’t keep planning for the 1950s

I remember my year on the planning committee as being wholly depressing. A proposal for a retirement home for the elderly in one of Bristol’s wealthier areas being transformed into one for adults with learning disabilities invoked a tirade of middle class outrage. Local children could be frightened and the nature of the area would change, fumed resident doctors and lawyers.

Since these were not ‘valid planning grounds’, we were told of a motoring Armageddon landing on the area. In a suburban area the development of some new housing by a black-led housing association was going to cause an environmental catastrophe and the opposition was, of course, nothing to do with racism.

Over the years the planning system had become the outlet for horrified citizens unable to halt the changes which were disrupting their lives. The one place they could protest, try and hold back the tide of change, was the planning system. It could give vent to their frustrations with their general powerlessness and the antipathy to a monolithic and unresponsive local authority. Protests, petitions and statements to councillors gave people an outlet.

It also provided a platform (at that time) for the growing Liberal Democrat presence on the council, with every Focus leaflet identifying some outrage which needed opposing.

The planning system was unable to respond to peoples’ needs because objections had to be based upon a genuine piece of planning policy guidance or with reference to the extensive and glossy Local Plan. Shoe-horning concerns into something which fitted planning law was often tortuous and tenuous. A quasi-judicial system was slowly but surely politicised and discredited.

As life has become more complex and changed ever faster, the Soviet-style 10-year planning cycle has been increasingly unable to respond. Much of the country has a crisis of housing supply, declining and emptying retail centres and derelict industrial sites. Bristol is no different.

The problem is that the planning system established in 1947 to deal with the immediate post-war problems has been amended and tinkered with but never fundamentally rethought.

As the cliché goes it is an analogue system in a digital age. The periodic designation of land uses is too slow and imprecise to meet the needs of communities or larger dynamic economic units like Bristol. One the one hand it seeks to protect local shopping areas by retaining a retail designation, leaving shops empty, but is unable to discriminate between types of shops which people might want for a viable retail use, not seeing the difference between a book shop and a bookies.

It has failed in holding back the advance of the supermarkets but has constrained the housing development the country so desperately needs.

The current planning system therefore leaves everyone unhappy developers, residents and even planners.

What is not needed is the removal of planning. You only need to go to some of the Eastern European countries, where the free market let rip without much of a planning system after the collapse of the Soviet Union, to see horrendous ugly sprawling development. What is needed is a fundamental review of what is needed from a modern planning system based around the needs of the 21st century rather than the 1950s.

Is it possible to have a system which facilitates suitable development rather than either stifling activity or surrendering to it?

Alderman Paul Smith (not a professional planner) is found on Twitter @bristolpaul