Sign of the times?
Daily Archives: 14 Aug 2016
What happens when your town falls out of favour with its Local Enterprise Partnership?
Hugo … Neil … where are you …? What is our LEP going to fund in our towns and villages in East Devon?
From Hansard: 21 July 2016
Sir David Amess (Southend West) (Con)
Will my right hon. Friend find time for a debate on the distribution of funds by local enterprise partnerships? The LEP in our area had Southend as No. 4 on its list and we have dropped off the radar dramatically. Something needs to be looked at there.
The Leader of the House of Commons, Mr David Lidington
My understanding is that that was an internal decision by the local enterprise partnership for south Essex, and I encourage my hon. Friend to make representations—I am sure he will do—on behalf of his constituents to the LEP. If that is not successful, I am sure that the relevant Minister in the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy will be keen to hear from him.
https://www.davidamess.co.uk/news/sir-david-calls-debate-local-enterprise-partnerships
“Crown Estate wades in on Hinkley C battle”
“The crown estate has waded into the battle over Hinkley Point, pointing out that offshore windfarms are already being built at cheaper prices than the proposed atomic reactors for Somerset.
While not arguing the £18.5bn nuclear project should be scrapped, the organisation – still legally owned by the Queen – said that the government’s current Hinkley review makes it a good time to consider the advantages of other low carbon technologies.
The crown estate said that windfarms at sea will be on course to meet 10% of the country’s electricity by 2020 while Hinkley Point C is not expected to be constructed till the mid 2020s, to produce 7%.
“The [wind] sector has undergone a sea change over the last few years, driven by rapid advances in technology, cost and the industry’s ability to deliver on time and to budget,” said Huub den Rooijen, the director of energy, minerals and infrastructure at the crown estate.
“In the Netherlands, there has been an even bigger step change. In the busy time around the EU referendum, many people will have missed the publication of their most recent offshore wind tender.
“Although there are differences in terms of regulation, most would agree that the Dutch are now going to be paying the equivalent of about £80/MWh for their 700 megawatt windfarm. That is significantly lower than Hinkley Point at £92.50/MWh.” …
… National Grid estimates that nearly half of all power could be generated from our seabed by 2030 through offshore wind, combined with tidal power lagoons and strong electrical connections to our neighbouring countries.
“We have an inexhaustible supply of reliable and clean power right on our doorstep, and competitively priced offshore wind now offers a mature part of the solution for the UK’s energy mix.”
And still we flog the dead radioactive nuclear horse of Hinkley C – in which so many members of our Local Development Partnership have a vested interest, and the UK continues to have a 20th century nuclear and renewables policy in a 21st century world.
“For all Japan’s talk of 43 ‘operable’ nuclear reactors, only two are actually running, writes Jim Green, as renewables and a 12% fall in demand eat into the power market. And while Japan’s ‘nuclear village’ defends safety standards, the IAEA, tasked with promoting nuclear power worldwide, has expressed deep concerns over the country’s weak and ‘fragmented’ safety regulation. …
… “The ability of existing Japanese nuclear plants, if restarted, to operate competitively against modern renewables (as many in the U.S. and Europe can no longer do) is unclear because nuclear operating costs are not transparent. However, the utilities’ almost complete suppression of Japanese wind power suggests they are concerned on this score.
“And as renewables continue to become cheaper and more ubiquitous, customers will be increasingly tempted by Japan’s extremely high electricity prices to make and store their own electricity and to drop off the grid altogether, as is already happening, for example, in Hawaii and Australia.”
The Japan Association of Corporate Executives, with a membership of about 1,400 executives from around 950 companies, recently issued a statement urging Tokyo to remove hurdles holding back the expansion of renewable power – which supplied 14.3 percent of power in Japan in the year to March 2016.
The statement also notes that the outlook for nuclear is “uncertain” and that the 20‒22% target could not be met without an improbably high number of restarts of idled reactors along with numerous reactor lifespan extensions beyond 40 years.
Andrew DeWit, a professor at Rikkyo University in Tokyo, said the push signalled “a profound change in thinking among blue-chip business executives.” DeWit added:
“Many business leaders have clearly thrown in the towel on nuclear and are instead openly lobbying for Japan to vault to global leadership in renewables, efficiency and smart infrastructure.”
Hug a planner? Maybe not in East Devon …
This report might have more credence if it did not mention Cranbrook as an example of good planning when we all know its developer-led design is already falling out of favour with residents!!!!
“A new report points out the benefits of listening to planners’ ideas instead of denigrating them.
If you know any planners, go out and hug them. At one time or another, most people will have reason to be grateful to their profession – for mitigating the expansion of a neighbour’s house, for example, or stopping an open-all-hours club opening in their street. We take it for granted that noxious industries can’t pop up in residential areas and that historic buildings and green spaces have some protection. This is due to planning, an area of government that is nonetheless showered with exceptional levels of derision.
Planners are faceless bureaucrats. Grey. So grey that they feel the need to brighten up their world and ours with colourful swaths of red tape. Or, worse, power-crazed social engineers who tell us how to live. They put brakes on prosperity, growth and freedom of choice. “There are countless jobs tied up in the filing cabinets of the planning regime,” said Michael Heseltine in 1979 and he thought the line so good and true that he said it again in 2012.
Actions follow these words. The planning system is endlessly being reformed, to speed it up, improve “delivery”, to save the £3bn a year that its delays are alleged to cost the economy. At the same time, planning departments are hit particularly hard by cuts in local government spending. Once councils have paid for their statutory and essential obligations, they find it easiest to squeeze apparently optional activities such as planning.
So it’s not surprising that the overwhelming majority of planners, according to a report to be published this week, believe that they cannot provide the benefits of planning due to the constraints and changes in their jobs. The report argues that reforms of the planning system often don’t work. It challenges the fantasy that, if only the bolts on the planning machine could be loosened enough, private enterprise would achieve the abundant flow of new housing that the country desires. It argues that there are economic costs to inadequate planning, such as uncertainty and the cost of poor decisions.
More than this, the report says that current demands for housing mean that planning should be strengthened, so that it can go beyond its usual role of reacting to developers’ and private citizens’ proposals. It can help remove obstacles to development such as contamination and poor infrastructure. It can assemble pieces of land to make a viable site. It can help remove risks and address the long-term quality of a place in ways that private companies often cannot.
The report cites examples of cohesive and successful developments, such as the seven-hectare Brindleyplace in Birmingham, where 12,000 jobs are now based, or the new community of Cranbrook in Devon, which may provide 7,500 homes. In these places, it says, planning played a crucial role in making private development possible.
The report is commissioned by the Royal Town Planning Institute, the professional body of planners, which will prompt the nation’s Heseltines to snort that they would say that, wouldn’t they? Certainly, it describes a world where planners are more influential and respected and better funded than they are now. Its plonky title, Delivering the Value of Planning, smells of those filing cabinets. Then again the Mandy Rice-Davies riposte could equally be applied to those housebuilders who argue for ever less planning. And rather than denigrate planners, it’s worth looking at the strengths of their arguments.
When making things that are expensive, immobile and long lived, such as construction projects, it’s common sense to consider the sum of actions in advance. When building a kitchen, you don’t just plonk down a cooker, sink and fridge and hope that they will end up in the right relationship to each other. You plan them. This gets more true as projects get larger and as space for building gets more scarce and precious, as is happening in Britain now.
Inadequate planning leads to places such as Ebbsfleet in north Kent, where huge investment has gone into its 19-minute rail connection to London, but it takes half an hour to walk from the station to the nearest house, and where some of the lakes formed by former quarry workings, potentially an asset, will be filled in. Good planning gives you places where people actually want to live, where value increases such that it can pay for more public benefits, where land is used well and homes are built at a reasonable speed. The choice is not that difficult.
East Devon Watch 