“London’s exceptionalism” versus a “South West lag”, will “levelling up” ever start? – Owl 

New analysis showing how the South West is a higher education “cold spot” means a unique approach to offering support to teenagers may be needed in the region, experts have warned. Numbers going on to university-level courses and levels of social mobility are among the lowest in England.

Lewis Clarke www.devonlive.com

Higher levels of deprivation in seaside towns and cities combined with a lack of local provision for many mean children growing up there are less likely to go to university than those living in other urban areas.

Researchers have identified “London’s exceptionalism” in higher education ambitions and a “South West lag”. Young people in the South West were the least likely to expect to go to university, to progress to university, or to have attended university. At age 17, 36 per cent of young people in the South West of England stated that they were very likely to go to university, compared to 63 per cent in London.

The study says these gaps cannot fully be explained by deprivation levels or the challenges of living in coastal and rural areas.

The research, by Chris Playford, Anna Mountford-Zimdars and Simon Benham-Clarke from the University of Exeter, is published in the journal Social Sciences . They used data from the Longitudinal Study of Young People in England, which has information about personal background, attainment, and aspirations, to model their chances of going to university.

Dr Playford said: “Our research shows policymakers should consider the role that regional dynamics may have in influencing the choices and constraints faced by young people. The South West is a special case for those wishing to increase educational opportunities and progression. It might be that outreach work trialled in other areas, for example ethnically diverse cities with a wide range of local higher education opportunities, simply cannot be translated into the context of the region.

“The peripheral location of the South West and the particular labour market opportunities, as well as the pattern of higher education availability, requires a bespoke approach to supporting teenagers to continue their education. For some young people, it is possible that not leaving their communities in pursuit of education and social mobility might be the best life choice.”

There are different barriers to accessing higher education for young people growing up in rural or coastal areas compared to similar young people in towns and cities inland. These include lack of public transport and reliable internet connection. But the study says this does not explain why children in the South West have lower aspirations and progression than their peers elsewhere in the country.

At age 18 a third of young people in the South West had applied for a university course. This was lower than for any other region of England and compares to 55 per cent in London.

By age 25, 42 per cent of young people in the South West had attended university, compared to 61 per cent in London. Those who had grown up in urban coastal areas were notably less likely to have ever attended university (40 per cent), compared to those who lived in inland urban areas (50 per cent) and rural coastal areas (53 per cent).

A lower proportion of parents in urban coastal areas had attained a university degree (15 per cent) than in urban inland areas (19 per cent), rural inland areas (24 per cent), and rural coastal areas (24 per cent). In urban coastal areas, a slightly higher proportion of parents (17 per cent) did not want their children to continue in education at the end of compulsory schooling, compared to 12 per cent in urban inland areas, 16 per cent in rural inland areas, and 13 per cent in rural coastal areas.

Relax planning restrictions by an inch and developers, with their immense lobbying power, will take a mile. – Owl 

Building on the green belt should be part of the UK’s answer to the housing crisis, provided more effort is also put into improving the quality of urban green space, England’s nature chief says.

Fiona Harvey www.theguardian.com 

New housing and better protection for green spaces, wildlife and nature should not be seen as opposites, according to Tony Juniper, the chair of Natural England. The “oppositional mindset” that sees the two as “binary choices” does not reflect reality, and is hindering local communities from finding ways to provide enough homes for people, while restoring the UK’s dwindling species.

“What we need to be doing is thinking more about how we can accommodate high quality nature within and around residential developments, not only in order to meet nature targets, but also in order to promote social wellbeing,” he says in an interview with the Guardian. “Because we now know, from a vast body of evidence, that access to green spaces and areas with water is very, very good for people’s wellbeing.”

The green belt should not be sacrosanct, he says. England could end up with less green belt than it has currently, but “better quality greenbelt – that might have more houses in it. If you look at many green belts around England, quite a lot of them are pretty bereft of wildlife. They’re not very accessible. Some of them are not producing much food either.”

Instead of a blanket defence of green belt land, government and local communities should take “a more joined-up view” that could see some new building but better conservation, and more green space where people need it.

“If you look at the economic benefits we get from access to good quality, wildlife-rich green space, the economic value of that goes up in proportion to the amount of people who can reach it,” he says. “Putting woodlands in remote areas is going to have much less social benefit than putting woodlands in areas next to where people live.”

Juniper’s stance is in contrast to that of many campaigners for whom the green belt is a totemic issue, and who resist encroachment on it. But his pragmatic attitude has been honed from years spent arguing the scientific case for nature to often sceptical ministers and civil servants, finding ways to push for bold action within straitening officialdom.

A zoologist and conservationist by training, whose first area of study was parrots, he has long experience of straddling what others may regard as starkly different roles. Before taking the Natural England chair in 2019, Juniper had combined heading the campaigning charity Friends of the Earth – usually regarded as one of the deepest green of activist groups, more radical in outlook than Greenpeace – with advising King Charles when he was Prince of Wales.

Natural England is charged with ensuring green targets, such as protecting 30% of the UK’s land by 2030, are met. But though these targets are still in place, government policy has changed in ways that many think will make the targets more difficult to meet – or even impossible. Rishi Sunak has taken a publicly anti-green stance, with U-turns on several aspects of climate policy.

Nature policy has also been a battlefield – the government announced in August it would roll back policies on nutrients that required housebuilders to make provision for sewage. The nutrient regulations were designed to prevent further pollution of rivers, which are already under severe threat from water companies’ cavalier attitude to sewage overflows from new housing.

After a bitter row blew up over the proposals, the government backed down, but it is not clear what attitude the new environment secretary, Steve Barclay, who replaced Thérèse Coffey in this week’s reshuffle, will take.

Juniper, speaking before Barclay’s appointment but while Coffey was widely rumoured to be replaced, said the nutrient neutrality scheme that Natural England had been piloting for about 18 months was working well.

“Frustrations are expressed in different places and we get criticised for holding up development. But I fully reject that on the grounds that we’re putting a great deal of effort to enable development, at the same time as enabling government and the country to meet their very stretching targets for nature recovery,” he says.

Juniper is not afraid to take on environmental shibboleths. As well as the nutrient scheme, he supports the biodiversity net gain regulations, and local nature recovery strategies, that will allow for new developments of housing, industrialisation and urbanisation, as long as there are compensatory projects elsewhere. Take newts, he offers. Great crested newts are protected species, and have had “iconic status” among builders because for many years, if populations were found then development had to cease.

Today, builders can use the modified rules to carry on building if they also agree to protect populations of the species in other areas. Rather than being a cop-out, this is an improvement, according to Juniper.

“Trying to protect a remnant population of these amphibians in an isolated pond is one thing, it may not have very much long-term ecological benefit. However, if you can say we are going to sacrifice that pond, but we’re going to build 10 others, and we’re going to put those 10 others in places where we know we’ll get maximum benefit for the connectivity of the new population, then this is leading to better outcomes for nature,” he says.

Though Juniper is carefully neutral, seeing it as his current job to provide scientific advice on the UK’s nature to the government of the day, it is not hard to imagine how difficult that must be with a government whose rhetoric, and many recent actions, have been about attacking green experts and taking on the “Guardian reading, tofu-eating wokerati”, as the recently departed home secretary Suella Braverman put it.

More policy action is certainly needed, Juniper says. “There is a lot of really big chunky targets that government is seeking to reach. And you won’t reach them by doing nothing.” Is the government serious about those targets? “I hope so.” Is the policy situation, for instance with the restoration of the nutrient rules, stable? “I don’t know.”

His outlook at times may seem overoptimistic. The River Wye is dying under the load of chicken manure dumped in it from surrounding poultry farms. Juniper says: “Places like the River Wye remind us that we still have work to do in terms of being able to find ways of accommodating these parallel objectives for nature and food production.” Most environmentalists would regard that as quite an understatement.

He owns it was disappointing that species reintroduction was downgraded to “not a priority” under Coffey. The UK could benefit from more beavers, he says. But of the government’s actions overall, he will not be drawn. “Am I disappointed? I don’t think I’m in a position to be disappointed, I’m a public servant and I have to get on with it.” And if he were not a public servant? “I might be disappointed in my spare time.”

The Levelling Up and Regeneration Act has shown us that Bill work is hard work. In this reflective piece, CPRE’s Campaigns Officer Mark Robinson explains how it’s all been worth it. 

By Mark Robinson www.cpre.org.uk

Over the last year and a half, we’ve been working both on our own and in collaboration to influence the Government’s Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill (LURB), which has now become an Act of Parliament.

It’s been a long slog, a steep learning curve, and a big headache at times. Getting your head around hundreds of pages of legislation and amendments-within-amendments-within-amendments hasn’t been easy.

But this piece aims to tell you one thing above anything – it’s been worth it.

Whether you’re interested in planning legislation or not, the areas under its remit are pretty limitless – from the climate emergency to the housing crisis. Our experience has shown the importance of holding the government’s feet to the fire whenever key legislation is being developed. You can’t look the other way for a moment – influencing legislation is critical to building a planning system fit for people, nature and the climate. 

One Bill, a suite of issues

To understand just how wide the scope of this legislation was, let’s rewind to July 2020 when the government had just published its Planning White Paper. Within it were a host of radical proposals that essentially deregulated the planning system. It was an attack on local democracy and the environment, and along with others, we spent the best part of the subsequent year mobilising against it.

Several joint letters, petitions, stinging media attacks, and one award later, the government finally caved in, and the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill – published in May 2022 – was its answer. A Bill ostensibly about the government’s aims to level up the country but, above anything, it was about – you guessed it – planning.

The LURB contained a range of damaging provisions, including replacing a huge portion of existing environmental law with a new regime that may be far less rigorous than current standards. Net zero was virtually absent, alongside an evident lack of changes to address the escalating affordable housing crisis.

Of biggest concern to CPRE was the introduction of National Development Management Policies (NDMPs). These are a new type of planning policies that could be set, modified and enforced at the behest of the Secretary of State and – it seemed at the time – no one else.

NDMPs: the Long and Winding Road

Having a national streamlined policy for a range of key planning issues, from Green Belt to social housing provision, seemed like a potentially good idea. But it was completely wrong and undemocratic that according to the draft legislation, the Secretary of State could create and modify these policies without any public or parliamentary input. And it was a major risk that whoever happened to be the Secretary of State at any given time could set or change the planning direction of a whole area without any checks or balances.

Together with our partners, we formed the Better Planning Coalition in May 2022, representing 34 organisations across the environment, housing, planning, heritage and transport sectors with one common goal: a planning system fit for climate, nature and people. Splitting into working groups to influence the range of areas in the Bill – from climate to housing – we worked in the local democracy group to challenge the government on NDMPs.

Through a tremendous effort of back and forth – Commons and Committee, Commons and Lords – we were able to carry an amendment calling for public and parliamentary scrutiny of NDMPs almost to the last minute. But it wasn’t to be.

Despite major efforts of CPRE supporters and local campaigners across the country, less than a week before the Bill became an Act, the government managed to dissuade the Lords from voting for parliamentary scrutiny of NDMPs.

It was a huge disappointment, but we had some significant wins:

• NDMPs, unlike before, will require full public consultation unless in ‘exceptional circumstances’
• Verbal assurances (known as ‘legitimate expectations’) that these exceptional circumstances really would be exceptional, like in the case of a pandemic. These reassurances can be used to hold ministers to account should they abuse these powers in future.
• Ministers will need to take climate change into account when preparing NDMPs

It may seem small, but legislation lasts for a long time. Any changes made can be seismic, and thanks to collaborative efforts across the sector and on the ground, alongside the tireless work of pro-democracy parliamentarians, we now have a mechanism to feed into the creation of a new suite of national planning policies and hold ministers to account if they try and bypass this democratic process. It wasn’t everything we wanted by a long shot, but it’s something to build on when previously we had nothing.

Other losses, other wins

As mentioned before, NDMPs weren’t the only concern we had in the Bill. Splitting the work between us, the Better Planning Coalition drafted a range of amendments for Peers to table in the House of Lords that would improve the Bill or remove its most damaging provisions, continually refining them throughout the process. Some of these amendments met their fate far too early, others lasted their way into the final text.

Climate change

A comprehensive amendment was drafted that would impose a duty on planning decision-takers to have special regard to climate change when considering their verdicts. Given the severity of the climate emergency, you’d have hoped this wouldn’t have been controversial. And yet, the government defeated this amendment when it came to a final vote in the House of Lords, claiming that the duty would leave decision-makers open to ‘legal challenges’.

This was an absolute cop-out – last year’s approval of the UK’s first deep coal mine in 30 years (set to create more emissions than all of the currently open UK coal mines combined) shows that the planning system is clearly not delivering for the climate and is in dire need of an update.

Health and wellbeing

An impressive coalition of organisations united in collaboration with Lord Crisp to table an amendment that ensured all new developments follow a set of ‘healthy homes principles’, but the government simply wouldn’t have it, making up yet another poor excuse that such principles were already covered in existing or upcoming legislation and guidance. One need only look to the state of many housing developments to see that current legislation absolutely isn’t working!

A final, compromise amendment simply calling on planning decision-takers to ‘have regard’ to health and wellbeing also fell through because of a lack of support in the Lords. This particularly sad ending is a damning indictment of a government that refuses to walk the walk when it comes to building beautiful, for the sake of everyone in the community.

It’s fair to say though that this isn’t the end of the road for either the climate or health and wellbeing work. Both campaigns now have their sights on upcoming opportunities to build these desperately needed principles into the planning system, ensuring the work done up to now won’t have been in vain.

Nature’s recovery

Onto the good news. Through the work of Wildlife and Countryside Link and the Better Planning Coalition, campaigners were able to secure several wins through the Bill, including:

• A strengthening of the duty on public bodies to protect our most precious landscapes
• A bolstering of the role of ‘Local Nature Recovery Strategies’ in the planning system
• Fighting back against the government’s attempts to scrap rules on ‘nutrient neutrality’
• A lot of this work will now need cementing and implementing, but some solid foundations have been laid in law thanks to some top-class collaboration.

Social housing

Perhaps the most progress of all was made on social housing, where work spearheaded by Shelter, both inside and outside the Better Planning coalition and supported along the way by CPRE, managed to secure a reform of ‘hope value’. This will allow local authorities to purchase land for social housing and other critical infrastructure at much cheaper prices.

In addition, CPRE’s long-running campaign for better regulation of second homes – which are strangling rural communities in holiday hotspots – made a huge step forward. In the final Act, a registration scheme was introduced for second homes and a new provision for councils to charge a council tax premium of up to 100% on second homes.

Learnings and lessons

All of this shows that, above all, sustained campaigning on legislation can have tangible outcomes that last for decades to come, even if you don’t achieve everything you set out for. A few other key learnings come to mind:

• Work in coalition, wherever you can. Legislation is intimidating enough, let alone if you’re approaching it on your own or from the view of just one organisation. By forming the Better Planning Coalition, and working in partnership with other fighting forces like Wildlife and Countryside Link and the RTPI, we were able to spread out our expertise and efforts, share vital information in real-time, build collective relationships with key parliamentarians, and have a real impact on the final Bill.
• Keep your eyes on the Bill. Excuse the pun, but the pace of change was erratic throughout the entire 18-month passage of the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act, and we needed to be constantly vigilant. This was especially the case when votes or hearings of the Bill were announced within a week’s notice, and we had to prepare briefings, reach out to our allies in the House of Commons and the House of Lords, and mobilise our supporters to get the turnout and vote in our favour.It was a lot of work, but the pressure evidently felt from government ministers during considerations of the Bill – particularly in its latter stages – and the concessions given, made it definitely worth it.
• The work never stops. With consultations galore to come, a revised version of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), and an election on the horizon, it’s become evident that there’ll be no point at which we can draw a line in the sand on this campaign. It’s just simply been transposed into different battlegrounds, and that’s where we’ll be turning our attention to next.

Besides, the fight to ensure our planning system is fit for the 21st century, tackling the nature and climate emergencies and building a thriving countryside for all, never really ends.

But now is at least a good chance to pause and reflect. Who knows, the next time a big piece of legislation comes out, we might even be more ready to take it on. I can say with certainty that it’ll be worth it.

Is North Devon an exception to the rule in Devon? – Owl thinks not.

North Devon councillors have claimed that dentistry is being abandoned after experts failed to attend an important meeting this week.

Alison Stephenson, local democracy reporter www.radioexe.co.uk

Representatives from NHS Devon, Plymouth University and dentists themselves were invited to talk to North Devon Council’s policy development committee about the lack of NHS provision in the ara, but they refused.

Cllr John Patrinos (Ind, Lynton and Lynmouth) said he was saddened but not surprised at “the refusal of anyone with professional knowledge of the delivery of dentistry and orthodontics to talk to us.”

He told the committee that one person said they were not willing to discuss the matter again having already done so at a health care scrutiny meeting in Devon, and sent a link so councillors could view that meeting instead.

“We have been fobbed off with internet links when people are in pain.”

Cllr Peter Jones (Ind, Witheridge) said it was “horrendous that no-one had turned up to the meeting.”

“What is our society coming to when an entire area of healthcare is being absolutely abandoned,” he said.

NHS Devon figures show 6,287 people are on NHS dental waiting lists in North Devon and Torridge, of which 1,183 are children. Across Devon, almost 100,000 people are waiting to see a dentist.

Cllr Patrinos said the “strange payment system” imposed by the government meant dentists receive the same payment from the NHS for a patient who requires 10 fillings as for a patient who needs just one.

“Treating a patient earns three Units of Dental Activity (UDA) points, regardless of the length and expense of the procedure. Every practice has to meet an annual UDA target. So there is no incentive to practise preventive dentistry, and every incentive to exclude the patients with the greatest needs.

“To make it even worse, the NHS allocates dental funding to areas, like Devon, on the assumption that about one in six people won’t need any care and about one in three are treated privately. So funding is given for half the population, and the money per person isn’t enough to pay for their treatment. “

He quoted an example from a dentist who said there is a £1,350 difference between what the NHS pays and private fees in the case of a patient needing four hours of surgery to extract two teeth and receive several fillings.

Cllr Patrinos said there is no orthodontist in North Devon to adjust children’s braces as their mouths grow.  He claimed that Ukrainian refugees in the district were flying back to their home country for dental treatment because they couldn’t find it here.

He said he had tried to get a NHS dentist to open in Lynton after 1,000 residents sign a petition, but it didn’t come to fruition because of funding issues. Residents in this part of North Devon have to travel 20 miles to see a dentist, he said.

Cllr David Clayton (Lib Dem, Barnstaple with Westacott) said dentistry had been flagged up by North Devon’s Conservative MP Selaine Saxby since she was elected and he hoped she would to more to raise the issue in parliament.

Members agreed to write to her to ask her to make dentistry the thrust of a private members’ bill, which allow her to try to get an issue made law.

Ms Saxby said last year the government reformed dental contracts so dental practices can maximise the number of NHS patients they can see.

In April, dental contracts becamethe responsibility of Integrated Care Boards, and the government is considering how to speed up the recruitment of overseas’ dentists.

But she said the changes are not happening soon enough. “Whilst I welcome the long term plans the government is bringing in for more dentists in areas like North Devon, concrete steps need to be taken now so that people’s health is not negatively affected,” she said.

“I urge everyone in North Devon to sign this petition which I will take back to Westminster as a demonstration of just how much immediate action is needed.”

The petition is at https://change.org/DentistsinNorthDevon