planning

Here's a duplicate of my post on my BrookesBlog:

Rumour reaches me that our big planning application for the new library and teaching building has been, as it is termed, "called in" so that the decision will be made once again by all 48 city councillors. So the decision of the Strategic Development Control Committee, whom council elect to make large planning decision on their behalf, is for the second time being challenged and could yet be overturned and the application refused permission.

I have to admit that my own record on this sort of thing is hardly blemish-free - it was I who arranged for the decision in 2000 to allow the Oxford International Centre for Islamic Studies the go ahead to build on Marston Road reopened in full council after even full council had approved it narrowly on the very tenuous grounds that because we had had council elections in between and the composition of the council had changed it was potentially a material difference since the decision had been made! My argument was rejected, thankfully, and although I would probably still have preferred for the Islamic Centre not to have marked the start of development encroaching down the green spaces on the Marston Rd that divide the city from the suburb, given the often rather bleak look of what we have built opposite, I do rather find the Islamic Centre architecture a welcome break from 21st century halls of residence!

However, having been involved in the other side of planning now, i.e. from the applicant's point of view, both with Oxfordshire Community Land Trusts and more recently obviously with this Brookes application, I am a reformed character in that respect. As a memorandum put out by the city council's head of planning Michael Crofton-Briggs a couple of years later stated (at the time trying to remind councillors that appeals could be expensive and losing an appeal even more so) the principle of British planning law is that by default property owners should be allowed to do what they want on their property, unless there are well grounded public policy reasons why not.

Planning officers - the professionals whom the council appoints to be the "expert witness" if you like applying the local plan and local development framework to test each application and to recommend decisions to councillors - have twice now recommended approval for the building. The Strategic Development Control Committee has twice now followed the officers' recommendations and approved the application - the last time by the narrowest possible majority in a 12 person committee - 7 votes to 5 - and this time somewhat more convincingly at 9 votes to 3. And both applications it seems will now end up being decided by the whole council.

It seems to me that the way this process works actually turns on its head that fundamental planning principle of allowing property owners to do what they want with their property by default, and implies what is the reality, that councillors feel that they have a right to hold something up until the applicant satisfies them. But I know only too well now what this sort of politicking costs. We are strong enough to be able to bear such costs, but when the applicant is someone, say a small developer, engaged on his main business activity, putting everything on hold, sometimes for years if a protracted appeals process ensues, can be enough to break such a business, which is an appalling price to pay for lay-councillors deciding to play a little politics with that developer's property.

Development control is supposed to be a "quasi-judicial" process. Whilst justice demands rightly that objectors have their opportunity to comment and campaign against something, I do wonder whether ultimately the correct people to make the end decision, to balance, for example, the essentially non-voting applicant - "Oxford Brookes University" per se, does not have a vote in local elections and a very large proportion of our students do not vote (as students tend not to anywhere) - whereas the objectors are people who do have a vote and whose votes councillors must gain or retain when they are up for election.

So the incentives, I'll say no more than that, are for councillors to side with the voters, and the most vocal of them at that, and not with applicants. It should be borne in mind too that their obligation is to all their constituents and not just the most vocal and erudite and some of these councillors have a lot of students in their ward who may not have voted for anyone but are still entitled to their councillors' consideration.

Maybe it's time that all planning decisions were handled by some kind of dispassionate professional service rigourously applying law and policy in a properly judicial setting.

Let us just hope that this time, sense will win out, and those who understand the contribution that Brookes makes to the local economy (which our city council has endorsed previously as part of the South East Plan which is where they should have raised objections if they wanted to I'd suggest) and that jeopardising the redevelopment of our physical facilities to better reflect our academic reputation, will have a majority in full council and that we do not need to go through the tortuous process of an appeal.

Constructions costs are now back on the rise. The longer gaining permission takes the more expensive, potentially, the development becomes, and the more of a diversion of resources that will mean from front line teaching, learning, research and student experience activities.

Thanks to Stephen Glenn for pointing me to this lovely new descriptive word for the supermarket giants, and to the Lib Dem media release website for highlighting this issue via Tim Farron.  But I'm afraid unlike Stephen or Tim I cannot actually see just in what way the Lib Dems have any better policies than the other two vacuous parties on the issue of how to protect our farmers from exploitation by the supermarket oligrarchy, or, as the title says, the "trolleygarchy".

What I do see is all three parties falling over themselves to think of new things for the state to do to address some perceived problem that even the Competition Commission seems to have suggested was not such a big issue.  But I suppose it was a farming conference so they're bound to have been wanting to promise these potential voters that they would each do something to defend their interests in return for their earth salted votes - such is what politicians do.

But it provides a useful example as to what the real, liberal, process should be to such issues.  Why on earth are we, or anyone else, calling for more regulation, more bureaucracy, more costs?  Why don't we look at how this market got to this position?  At the state's role previously and now, in disadvantaging one group and protecting the other.  And see whether there are things the state should stop doing to make this a fairer market rather than creating another state bureaucracy to try and fix problems still being created by state action?

For on both the demand and the supply side of the market for this most basic of commodities, the food that keeps us all alive, we find a trail of evidence leading back to state action that has made it ever more likely that these giant retailers would emerge in the first place and dominate from then.  Not that I am saying that big is necessarily bad of course - if they are delivering what consumers want at the right price and quality, they could have a monopoly for all I care, so long as there are no barriers for others to enter the market should they see that efficiency slip and see a way of doing better for the consumer. 

But they have had help in achieving that dominance.  There's a huge amount of food regulation that, inevitably, the bigger firm is better placed to meet, and not just to meet, but to lobby regulators to suit them too.  On the demand side, state mismanagement of everything from money supply to housing markets has resulted in a vanishingly small number of households now being able to house themselves on one income, and so hard pressed home-makers juggling jobs and home life demand more convenience foods.  No longer is a leisurely trip to a local market for raw ingredients, freshness and quality decided by eye, nose and trust in the local man or woman behind the counter, followed by an hour by the stove and time to feed the family all at once the familiar way of doing things.  So there is more demand for, and thence regulation of, more conveniently packaged and ready-prepared food - ever more ranges to stock; ever larger stores to accommodate them.

On the supply side, we caved into the EU some years ago now in losing most of our local abattoirs, so farmers are more likely to have to sell into a mass market with smaller margins than be able to sell more locally with fewer middle-men taking a cut.  The fact that we do not charge for road use means that there are benefits of scale in moving food in huge quantities around the country, again meaning you are less likely to sell direct to local retailers, but through buying groups that aggregate whole regional and even national production and put pressure on prices.  This same factor means we are happier jumping in the car and traveling ten miles to a superstore than patronising local stores in a local supply chain - and those out of town stores are not fairly taxed on their land use, as they can offer massive free car parks with no rates on them.

As premium produce tends to be more labour intensive, our tax system, based on employment, creates big disincentives in an already narrow margin industry to employing those extra people and getting better prices for premium goods.  And on the retail side, low skill jobs that sometimes probably would not be worth the minimum wage to smaller retailers can be better afforded by big operators offering shift work and annualised hours to enable them to operate when family owned retailers would all want to be in bed because their overheads for waiting up for one romantic couple in aisle three at three in the morning are just too high.

So, whilst it is obvious that this is all a lot more complicated that merely being about defending the farmer against the trolleygarchy, it should also be quite clear that the trail of blame as often as not lies in earlier and ongoing state action that helps protect the big retailers and squeeze the farmers - we have not even looked at the history of land subsidy (how do farmers expect to make money out of things that only a few years ago, relatively speaking, we kept lakes and mountains of across Europe?).  Instead of having yet more bureaucracy and regulation, the liberal response should be to look at where the market is already heavily skewed by state action and stop doing it!

Employment regulation, food laws and "consumer protection" (once it was enough to ensure that the meat wasn't green and smelly when you bought it, now it all expires days or weeks before it would actually be unfit and so in thrown out), transport policy, taxation policy, the openness of our political system to lobbying for favours - always benefiting the bigger players, all these need looking at before another layer of regulatory bollocks is imposed.

But has anyone spotted the little irony - that one of the biggest retailers the farmers are complaining about, ASDA, was once a farmers' collective, and their last Chief Executive was also a Tory MP!

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Earlier I spent a very pleasant, if slightly nerve-wracking, evening "chairing" the final "Meet the Author" session of my employer, Oxford Brookes University's, "Love and Justice Month". Our guest author, and an honorary graduate from the 2008 round of graduations, was Teresa Hayter, author of "Open Borders: The Case Against Immigration Controls".

Teresa is a long time campaigner against immigration controls and the asylum machismo that tabloid editors and leading politicians promulgate and revel in. She was a founder member of the Campaign to Close Campsfield (with which Lib Dem MP Evan Harris is often involved) way back in 1993 when I barely knew the place existed. Campsfield is one of the several Immigration Reception/Detention/Removal (whatever the phrase is this year) centers with which our government pursues its racist, authoritarian, violent and at times lethal "war on the foreign poor".

Towards the end of the discussion session after Teresa's inspiring talk one person asked what the practical political and social implications would be of a completely open borders policy. And it struck me; just what is a state without borders? After all, one view of the state is that it is the territorial monopoly of arbitration. And if you don't demarcate that territory somehow, beat the bounds, spray like a wandering dog-fox the limits of that monopoly, in what way are you a state at all?

Now, the free movement of people is one thing (and I agree, absolutely, with it), but it seems to me that it is just a visible and, to an extent, preventable - in the sense that you can turn people around; treat them like shit and send them home to God knows what - symptom of the new global world we live in.

As I have written many times before, the communication networks that now span the globe make our less visible borders much more porous. Whether it is forming alliances with like minded people in other countries (for good or ill), moving capital around the globe to take advantage of favourable tax regimes, trading with ever smaller units of production, gradually sidelining the mighty intermediary trans-national corporations in favour of dealing with individuals and smaller and medium sized enterprises in other countries.

And you know, it may sound obvious, but we need to remember, recognize for the first time for some, that the genie of globalization (whilst the definition of what that means might be in dispute) is well and truly out of the bottle. We no longer live in a world in which China is "over there somewhere" - a blob on a map that was never pink but about which we knew little - or in which someone in a shanty town in Mumbai cannot see live images of the once "mother country" and aspire to some different life. Or in which we can be oblivious to goings on in the "dark continent" between Dr Livingstone's occasional letters home. In which football competitions are between small towns and cities in one country or the players all from the local community.

Yet, for all our former national adventurous spirit, colonizing an empire on which the sun never set, here we sit, cowering on our rock off the edge of Europe besieged by the idea that everyone wants to come here and destroy our way of life or that our tax revenues are steadily going down the drain in some tax haven somewhere. Migration is a two way thing. For all that people do want to come here, we should be matching that with still pioneering people going out into the wider world. But our world seems to want to enforce some kind of permanence through its nation states - you belong to one or another, very occasionally a couple at the same time, which crystalizes both the desires and fears of migration.

Rather than people choosing to come here for a job for a few years and then heading off somewhere else, or even just "back home", our immigration controls make people choose between staying permanently or going permanently (unless, that is, you happen to come from a most favoured rich country). If we are truly in a globalized world we should be feeling a lot freer than, say, we were thirty years ago when my parents as ex-pats dragged me around various African countries, to do just that: a job here, a job there, a holiday somewhere else, some time back home; all the time maximizing the return from each of our skills.

And if we don't pick up that challenge, if we choose to turn our backs and pretend that old world of bi-monthly dispatches from the colonies is still how it is "out there", like a child hiding our eyes and believing that because we can't see others they can't see us, the alternative is very grim indeed; a war of all against all. And, like that child, it is a scary world out there - we don't know quite what would happen if we open up here, open up there.

I happened to be reading Hayek's postscript to the "Constitution of Liberty" too the other day in which he explains "Why I am not a conservative" and I probably for the first time realized the essential difference between liberal and conservative. Liberty demands a leap into the unknown. Authority, conservative or socialist, on the other hand demands a plan. Without that plan they cannot feel in control; without being damn sure, or as sure as they can be, about the outcome, they dare not proceed; true "progress" is stopped in its tracks. And it seems innate in our collective psyche - how many times have I been explaining what I think is a bright new idea to find the first question on everyone's lips is "where have they done this before" - and that's just amongst my "liberal" friends!

At an individual level, there is a vast industry in "life coaching"; trying to teach us to push our boundaries, leave our comfort zone, to trust that we can overcome whatever obstacles may fall into our path when we branch off into new experiences and journeys. We are told that's what makes us grow, to succeed; that without pain there is no gain, or that discomfort is what makes us stronger through dealing with it. But at the level of the state, of government, we do not heed that same advice.

Some, usually on what they call the "left", bleat on that libertarian policies would mean a "return" to a vicious, beggar everyone else "Victorian laissez-faire" world (which I keep reminding them in vain was precisely the system which prompted the early anarchists and libertarians to work against the state entrenched systemic inequity and monopolies they saw skewed the outcome of that laissez-faire) in which there would be no support for the poor and hapless. They need to learn to trust in humanity. We have been "schooled" for over a century now into a more or less consensus that we do need to help support some others who cannot help themselves. The authoritarian will say only the "state" can ensure that mutual assistance can be assured fairly. That if we take that state away, there would be no hospitals, no schools, or that they would be only exclusive, unavailable to many or even most of the population. But in doing so, that state is necessarily coercive, illiberal, and suffocating.

We need to free people up to care, not to subcontract caring to some state entity that at best has only a partial mandate. And we will choose, at times, not to care - or at least to prioritize caring for ourselves over others when we barely have enough for ourselves. We can only guess that, on balance, there will always be enough people choosing to care such that those who are less fortunate through no fault of their own are not left defenseless or destitute. It's not a plan and it's inherently difficult to manage, predict or measure but it is what liberty is about.

But the world is getting smaller all the time. If we do not free ourselves from that micro-managed planned outcome authority on our own, it may become inevitable anyway simply because the Cnut-like alternative is too horrible for even the statists to contemplate or when we peasants realize how horrible what they contemplate for us looks like. We may as well choose to trust in a positive vision of humanity rather than get more and more worked up about defending the status-quo until something gives, suddenly and explosively.

No wonder the Big Brother state is getting worried about all these pressures on it. Lots of powerful and wannabe powerful, or just self-important, people are threatened with being cut down to size; people who think they know better than the rest of us and want the opportunity to force their vision on the rest of us. Let us hope us serfs begin to get agitated!

Now all the caveats about difficult cases and bad law notwithstanding, and the sensitivity of the case, being one of a severely wounded veteran fighting this government's ridiculous war in the arse end of the world, it is, quite categorically, none of Downing Street's business to be interfering in a local development control decision:

Joe Townsend lost his legs while serving in Afghanistan

Gordon Brown has ordered a council which told a disabled soldier he could not build a specially-adapted home on his grandparents' land to reconsider.

Wealden council had said the planned building in Pevensey, for Royal Marine Joe Townsend, 20, who lost his legs in Afghanistan, would be "intrusive".

But Downing Street said the "country owes Joe huge gratitude" and said the authority must "do the right thing".

The Sussex council said it had told the government it hoped to find a solution.

A statement issued by the Prime Minister's office said: "The whole country owes Joe huge gratitude for the sacrifice he has made for our country, and it is unacceptable that he is being stopped from having the home of his choice.

"Wealden District Council must do the right thing immediately and reconsider this case." [From BBC NEWS | England | Sussex | PM orders rethink on soldier home]

Now, I'm no great fan of the present development control system. It allows too many interfering busybodies to poke their nose into what people choose to do with their own land. A better system would be based on private negotiation with land occupiers surrounding the site who would be most directly affected.

However, with the benefit of modern technology, it is possible to have a look at such planning applications nowadays and see what was actually said by the council. What is also interesting to note is that the same grandfather made a similar application for a detached house in the grounds of his property seven years ago, and unless young Joe was a child soldier of thirteen, which even the British military seems to frown upon these days, it was not for him presumably!

The council made exactly the same observations in that case too - the proposal was for a building outside of the area designated for housing in a rural setting which would be intrusive into the rural views. Now whether that is actually true, or reasonable, of course I cannot tell from a distance, but they do at least appear to have been consistent.

What is more, they do not appear to be refusing outright any facility for Joe, but suggesting that it be attached to the existing house. There are all sorts of good reasons for this - not the least of which is the question of what happens when the specific need is no longer required, or when someone wants to sell the main house.

So, it would appear on a cursory investigation that Downing Street has been dragged into something that has been going on for a number of years - starting with a speculative application to create a new house for no specific purpose other than as an extra asset, in an area which the local plan seeks to preserve as rural open space, and which, on the face of it is now using poor Joe to achieve a similar aim.

Downing Street, of course, all too keen to be seen to be supporting "our boys" where they have so signally failed them previously - through lack of equipment in theatre, lack of facilities for wounded veterans of a conflict we shouldn't be in, and a complete disregard for the military covenant they owe to the good people they send out on their crazy geo-political adventures - appears to have become embroiled in a most inappropriate way in the affairs of the legal planning authority for the area.

Astonishing that they (the government or the BBC) can do what appears to be less investigation than I have managed in half an hour! But then that's meddling Gordon for you. Controlling everything but in control of nothing.

Of course, if my cursory investigation and resulting opinion is totally wrong, I shall retract all of this - but there is more than meets the eye ging on here and Downing Street have cocked up in "instructing" a local council to "do the right thing".

UPDATE:  It seems that lots of people have been getting involved in this.  The Fister's reaction appears to have been brought on by populist TV tosspot Noel Edmonds who featured the decision on his Sky TV show as mentioned at the Press Association here.  I wonder if Noel was given the full history?  It is also mentioned at the Telegraph and Guardian who both mention that David Cameron has got involved. 

Now, it may be that both this decision, and the decision seven years ago to refuse a similar applicaiton were a "matter of balance" as planners would say, and that reconsideration of the application, without an appeal, is warranted. 

But there's also a matter of principle here, that number 10, nor really David Cameron (the council is Conservative controlled incidentally I believe), should be butting in on the basis of a television program.  I wonder how his Tory councillors elsewhere feel about DC telling some of their number what to do - is this their definition of "localism"?

If this was a court of law (and development control is a "quasi-judicial" process) Noel Edmonds, the Fister and Dave would be held in contempt I think and any decision made on the basis of their intervention somewhat tainted.

Yes, I'm still meant to be on internet silence, but Linux and various bits of software have me stumped for a while until I get some help from the mailing lists, so I thought I'd cast my mind over the implications of the court case this week that resulted in a jury deciding that it was okay to commit a crime in order to prevent what the perpetrators believed would be a greater harm in the future. The case in point was that they had committed (and admitted) criminal damage by climbing a chimney at a Kent power station with the intent of scrawling graffiti on it in protest at its pollution record and plans to expand the facility, which, their oh so clever advocate declared would cause more and more widespread damage to people and property through the global warming it would contribute to.

Now, some of the more unthinking environmentalists might see this as a great victory. A court recognized that global warming was such an imminent threat to life and property that it was justifiable to commit brazen thuggery leading to criminal damage on anything that allegedly contributed to that global warming. Yay!?

Nay! I have two problems with this.

First is the acceptance, apparently by both judge and jury (and so, you may think, all "reasonable people"), not just that anthropogenic climate change is a fact but also such a grave threat that it justifies individuals taking the law into their own hands. To my mind this is still a matter in the political arena. Not only are there still, and perhaps growing, voices of dissent on the very premise of the debate; that mankind is responsible for such a change that it is a threat to the planet's very future. But also about what to do about it and when. A power station after all merely supplies a demand. Is the power generator guilty or the consumer making those demands? It is more dangerous to disrupt existing dwindling supplies before we have worked out how to replace them with cleaner affordable technologies? If the threat from global warming is real, so presumably is the threat of harm through disrupted power supplies.

Second is how this operates as a precedent in other, possibly more serious cases - although I heard someone saying that this decision will not be treated as forming a precedent, I'm not clear how that can be prevented. It is okay to murder an abortionist in order to stop the immediate harm to others he or she will cause? That threat, after all, is far more immediate and traceable to an individual than the effects of a single coal power station amongst all the coal fired power stations and other "climate vandals". We're starting to get not only into the realms of Philip K Dick's pre-crime but vigilante prevention of what individuals claim may be a pre-crime. This is hardly the basis for the rule of law.

Oh, you can say that no court is going to acquit a murderer because they thought they were preventing a bigger crime, but actually we already do. The "reasonable force" defense can be used to justify a death in the process of preventing an immediate threat to others' life. This decision seems to extend the boundaries of "immediate threat" let alone accurate identification of the person causing that immediate threat.  One could, and many do, fight abortion on the basis that the most immediate threat t future generations of humanity is eradicating them before they are born.  If we're going to adopt a principle (and I do) that we have a responsibility of stewardship not to harm future generations' survival on the planet then it would be legitimate for others to argue more forcefully that we have a responsibility to see those future generations actually survive as far as birth!

Anyway, two odd sounding sources provide what I believe are better alternative "precedents" to work from. First, there is a Catholic maxim that it is not legitimate to cause one moral bad, or an act that could foreseeably lead to morally bad consequences in order to prevent another, even near certain, specific bad. It is used mostly about abortion again. It is used to argue that it is not even permissible to abort a new life in order to prevent the death of the mother - often in the circumstances of an ectopic pregnancy for example.

Of course the world's aggressors, including the US and UK, routinely ignore this. They argue that foreseeable "collateral damage" is permissable to remove a dictator, for example. It is not. Terrorising and killing the people of Bagdad in "Shock and Awe", even as "collateral", was morally repugnant, notwithstanding our general agreement that the regime they were trying to punish or remove was also morally repugnant. The results of ignoring of this basic principle are there for us all to see - there can be little doubt now that more people in Iraq have suffered for longer under the oversight of the western occupying forces than it is likely would have happened at the hands of the previous repugnant regime. At least there could have been alternatives that held less potential for further suffering.

But on the environment, the libertarians' respect for the rule of law provides a better alternative to various bearded crusties climbing a chimney and committing vigilante criminal damage. Locke's proviso can be used, for example, to tackle pollution. If you, a power generator or anyone else - a pig farm even, pollute the atmosphere we both have to share, we have the right to legal remedy. Just as much as if you came along and started digging a hole in my prize rose border. Indeed this ought to work better than any political "solution". Protectionism is a political strategy, and even Green politicians will forcibly protect their favourite, in this case, power generation mechanism against legitimate complaint of harm. If planning permission were truly privatised, those affected most would almost certainly do better out of it than they will once the government has removed most of their rights in order to force their political idea of strategic energy infrastructure through.

Yes, we all need power, but left to ourselves we would probably not choose to have a nuclear reactor at the bottom of our garden. But, as they say, everyone has their price. If, collectively, my neighbourhood decided that the compensation on offer was enough when weighed against the costs of electricity or the convenience of not having a long transmission route or any potential danger they'd accept that nuclear reactor. If nobody accepts any price for nuclear, they have to weigh that decision against the potential alternatives. If nobody wants a giant power station, then we perhaps have to accept that we will have to help our neighbours fund micro-generation.

Yesterday in my piece about the Policy Exchange think tank's suggestion that Oxford and Cambridge ought to be allowed to expand to as many as a million homes I mentioned the work "Car Free Cities" by J H Crawford which I came across a decade ago when looking into Oxford's last Local Plan. In it he postulates a city of a million people with a topology and transport system that means that any two addresses anywhere in the city would be no more than 35 minutes apart by foot and rapid transit system.

The city is made up of many districts of about 12,000 population like strings of beads along one of three overlapping rapid transport loops. Every home is less than five minutes walk from open countryside. And whilst the densities within the districts are amongst the highest on earth (similar to Seoul, for example, although nothing is more than three stories in the reference designs) only 20% of the total 100 sq mile (10 by 10) area is developed at all, leaving all the areas between the beads and strings as open countryside or managed parkland or whatever. Overall then the density is not a lot greater than Oxford's current density and less than the average of Greater London as a whole.

So, for a bit of fun, I superimposed Crawford's one million population city topology onto the ten by ten mile square centered on the current centre of Oxford. Now sure, a million population is only probably about a third of the million households the Policy Exchange report was ultimately suggesting, but if anyone says to you that it would simply be impossible to imagine a million people in the area between Wheatley and Eynsham, Littlemore and Kidlington, you can say you have seen how, and with no traffic and only 20% of the land developed to boot! It would currently take me over an hour to get from the end of one of these loops to about a third of the way out the adjacent one, incidentally.

Now nobody is suggesting that we do this, least of all me. I'm just demonstrating that it would be possible, indeed whilst making more of the green belt actually because all the space would be accessible in minutes rather than in half an hour in the car, it would reach right into everyone's neighbourhood - with open country no more than 400m from every front door. Fitting such principles into existing cities is of course much more difficult than an academic sitting at a drawing board with a blank sheet of paper. They need not be loops for example but twelve strings with termini at the end of each. It would increase average journey times but not the overall maximum of 35 minutes door to door and could be fitted in along existing radial roads as a series of villages.

Incidentally, the picture on the right here shows some of the housing in the ward with the highest density in England, at least that I can find - a "middle level super output area" either side of the Cromwell Rd in Kensington & Chelsea.  I notice from Net House Prices that there have been 267 £1m plus residential property transactions in the last eight years in this post code area.  This is getting pretty close to the densities that would be required in a city such as that in Crawford's book.  It's hardly slum clearance stuff is it!

When I saw the first press mention of the "Cities Unlimited: making urban regeneration work" report from the Policy Exchange think tank in the Oxford Mail yesterday screaming that "Oxford should get a million new homes" and I noticed prominent Lib Dem economics boffin Tim Leunig was involved I'm afraid I at first reacted with my heart, yelling "Not In My Back Yard, you heartless economist you" before engaging my head.

You see, all too often Tim has come out with some great ideas that have been instantly presented as the works of the devil himself. There were "community land auctions" which, for those who didn't think about it too much, was presented as the state confiscating land from private owners at a fraction of its value. Then more recently his idea for allowing people to sell the social housing home they rent in order to buy another one of their choice elsewhere which would in turn become a social housing home. Even I had to think about that one for a while before I thought it was anything other than a great council house give-away scam. Such is the fate, almost inevitably I suspect, of people who write about "agglomeration economics" and "gross value added" measures of local economic activity.

And so it is also with this report. It is, despite the economic jargon at times, quite an easy read, with what I find to be compelling arguments. It is counter-intuitive for sure, for anyone who has worried about what to do about the "North South divide" and traditional regional policy which has been focussed on using regeneration money to try and repopulate declining towns, to keep people where they are and bring the economic prosperity to them. It has enough controversial suggestions for any mischievous media outlet or politician in denial to pick out the one that seems to say most about their area and have a go at it.

And boy, have they had a field day with it. If you're vaguely northern, or Welsh, you are to be outraged that the report says regeneration has failed, and not only failed but unlikely ever to recover your town's fortunes. If you're in Oxford or Cambridge you've got a million new homes to get outraged about. If you're anti-Tory you will like the portrayals of it as demanding no more money should go to Labour heartlands in the north. It is, in some senses, a perfect storm - there's something for absolutely everyone to criticize about it. But I would suggest they read it first as it is apparent that many who have commented on it, from John Prescott down, have not.

Yes, it does say that the regeneration money lavished on declining cities and towns (and over the past four decades not just Labour's tenure) has been wasted. Of course, the Labour ministers and MPs who championed this money more recently going into their heartlands are outraged. But the report, or rather its predecessor data collection exercise, "Cities Limited", shows pretty conclusively that this failure is real - that, whilst they may be declining slightly less slowly in comparison with more prosperous areas than before the money was spent, they are certainly not catching up, or keeping up. But it does not, as Adam Bienkov writes at Liberal Conspiracy, call for that money to end, for the rest of the country to just "fuck off".

Actually quite the opposite. Anticipating an incoming Tory government will naturally be likely to have fewer "champions" of these northern former industrial towns, it suggests instead of these grand technocratically led regeneration projects controlled from the [London] centre, government should give pretty well the same total amount of money to the local authorities based on need but for them to spend on what they see fit for improving the quality of life in their own towns and cities. This, it says (or rather another predecessor report called "Cities for Success" said) will lead to stronger, better scrutinized and more responsive local government producing "quality of life" projects that people actually want, rather than what some central planner looking at house prices from Whitehall thinks is good for them.

So it's a document about devolution and decentralization of regeneration. About freeing those local authorities in declining areas to choose how they respond to that depopulation rather than how the centre says they should. It is not that spending money on a place always fails, it is that the over-riding concern of regeneration money and regional policy to date has been that these places need to be repopulated by that money, people actively encouraged not to up sticks and leave, despite the obvious fact that they stand to have greater opportunity and more possibilities for increasing their wealth by moving, when in fact the money might be best spent making the quality of life for those who remain far higher.

In fact, it says that this current regeneration policy has even worse effects. Because regeneration areas are still, despite the billions, growing at a slower rate than the successful areas, in insisting that they should be repopulated come what may, regeneration policy is "condemning" the people it persuades to remain or return there to a slow lane of growth. And that because the exodus is led by the more mobile, enterprising, adventurous and usually better skilled parts of the population, it means that what is being left behind is denuded of its greatest assets - the skilled people that might make it attractive for new businesses to set up there.

And of course, the other main controversy is about what those skilled people wanting to better themselves should do. Clearly, London is a huge draw - I always think if it personally as a black hole with government and the City at the singularity and threatening to swallow anything that falls into its event horizon which has been expanding for centuries. Others of course say they like London. So why would they want to prevent others having the same standard of living and opportunities as they do.

Adding an extra million homes around London, says the report, would be the equivalent of adding an extra two miles to the outskirts. Traveling along the M40 at Hillingdon at 70mph for example this, he says, would mean that it would take someone an extra two minutes to reach the countryside. Are we [in London that is] so selfish that we would deny that opportunity to others from "up north" for the sake of it taking an extra two minutes to get to open countryside? Conveniently, the response from the Lib Dem PPC for Hastings yesterday, reveals the answer:

Nick Perry, Lib Dem parliamentary campaigner for Hastings & Rye said, “I am a Northern lad hailing from St Helens, and our move to Hastings last year was a dream come true, however the calls from this Tory think tank are nothing short of bizarre."

So that's it is it. What's good for Nick Perry, indeed a "dream come true", is too bizarre to contemplate for everyone else who may want to better themselves. Ironically, had the Hastings Lib Dems read the report first they'd notice that Hastings is actually one of the exceptions in the South East. That it suffers by being connected only to the periphery of London's orbit and so would not be an ideal place for adding lots of people unless there was significant increased connectivity.

So, perhaps I can get more worked up about the section that talks about a million homes for Oxford and Cambridge, if I can't get excited about the thought of London expanding by two miles in each direction. Well actually, whilst personally I am in Oxford precisely because it is small, and probably would be one of those who would leave if it became terribly much bigger, that's because I can. My IT skills can be put to use anywhere. I could move to Liverpool and get similar pay in a similar academic institution to what I'm in here. But for others it's harder. Oxford and Cambridge, outside of London, are the only two UK academic institutions that get more in research money than they do for teaching students. On the global scale they are our only two really big knowledge generators. Leunig's position seems to be that if they are to remain it that position globally, and they'd damned well better as there is precious little else our economy will thrive on if not knowledge generation in the new global village, they too have got to capitalise on "agglomeration economics", to attract a real thriving community from around the world and the UK that services the expansion of the best brains in Britain in their subjects.

Of course here in Oxford, we can't even agree on whether it is right to have four thousand extra new homes, let alone a million. Our heads are simply not in the right place to hear the logic of what Leunig is telling us. But even if it does become someone's policy, should we be so scared of it? On the one hand, yes, clearly haphazard development of a million homes in a rural county is not on. But if we're looking at a new world order, with population migrations the like of which Britain has not seen since the Industrial Revolution urbanized Britain's population and gave rise largely to those northern towns, then we ought to be looking at new urban forms as well.

Here's a model from a book called "Car Free Cities" by a chap called J H Crawford I came across a decade or so ago in my reading up for the last Oxford Local Plan, that shows how a city of a million population can be fitted into a ten by ten mile area with development on only 20% of the square, where, thanks to rapid transit systems every home is no more than thirty five minutes traveling distance from any other location in the city, every home is less than five minutes walk from open countryside and which could be developed in phases linked into or threading between existing communities.

So, the worst I can say about the report is that "the truth hurts". The truth is that current regeneration projects have and continue to fail to bring less well off former industrial areas up to the standard and the ability to match in future seen in the more prosperous south east. It is cruel and heartless in the light of this to prevent people migrating from those areas to where their skills will be better rewarded and it would be but a small imposition on London in particular to host another million or so homes. We risk our place in the global future if we fail to recognise this reality and grasp the opportunities it presents to make more people better off than regeneration ever can. At the same time we need to make local authorities and local people in declining areas responsible for their own projects to make their quality of life better, whether in decline or otherwise. We need to empower them and finance them, and watch them compete with each other for the best ideas.

At the same time we need to free up from planning constraints land in the south east to accommodate inward migrants. We need to ensure also in the process that space is made for semi-skilled and unskilled also to come from those declining areas so that the balance of people moving out of them is not skewed too heavily towards the skilled sectors.

And all the signals that make this apparent are related to land value. That London is not yet at its optimal size is proven by the fact that people still pay more for their home than the capital cost of the home - ie that land still has some residual value that people are prepared to take a gamble on rewarding them by more than it has cost them to move. That some of the "Pathfinder" areas should not have housing replaced is indicated by the fact that housing costs less than it costs to build. We'd be better buying spare houses and allowing families in the neighbouring houses to expand into hem than knocking them down and replacing them, hoping against hope that they will fill up with bright young things who do not want to join the London black hole.

But there must be something I would criticize the report for, surely, and yes, there is indeed. Tim is always saying that his ideas are a new way of thinking about land, superior to and more suitable for the modern world than that other suggested reform a hundred years ago, Land Value Tax. But the report opens with a complaint that despite trying everything regeneration has failed. Well we haven't tried everything - we haven't tried land value tax. And if any of this report is to be taken on board and implemented we need LVT first. To ensure the timely release of non-housing land for housing, to ensure that Oxford is developed to its current optimum level before adding more, and so on. If Burnley has, as the report suggests, a negative residual land value, then people settling there under my suggested system of land tax and citizens' income , are going to actually be paid for living there. Any firm setting up there will face no taxes, either on its workers, profit or its location; it's going to be around 30% better off just for that and may indeed help attract skilled work back into tax free areas.

The report praises the London Docklands development. Docklands was primarily initially successful (key to regeneration is getting a critical mass of occupiers into a newly regenerated area quickly so it can start to form a community) because the LDDC declared a rates holiday for a decade. Rebasing our tax system to land values rather than incomes or productivity would help focus sustainable communities and give massive incentives, natural incentives, for communities to attract new settlers, especially in jobs that are not necessarily competing on a global scale. With that caveat, that full scale LVT should predate any of the changes suggested in this report, I think I support virtually everything else in it.

It's not comfortable reading necessarily, but I've long held that the rise of global communications and the internet is an epochal change the likes of the printing press or the steam engine. When the steam engine came along it reshaped Britain. Why should we expect, Cnut-like, to stand in the way of the next epochal technology changing the way we live on these islands?

One thing I would say though, Tim, if you read this - I reckon calling your own report "barmy" probably makes for worse press!

Area planning decisions to be recentralized? Area committees disbanded? Is this Labour in Oxford's response to near universal calls, in political terms (not least from their own Communities Department), for greater devolution and localism in our government structures?

They're pretty much already committed to the Stalinist recentralization of all planning decisions, slightly modified now to have two wider area based development control soviets as well as a supreme soviet committee in case even these two go against the Politburo's diktat or predilections. All because Labour councillors seemingly cannot work out how they could possibly "lobby" for their constituents wishes on some applications whilst helping decide on neighbouring wards' local applications.

I prefer the Danish system I believe it is, where areas more or less the size of streets have small committees purely dedicated to development control.

But in the absence of that a much more open system of area committee planning hearings would be a step forward rather than Labour's regressive centralizing power grab. Colleagues in other authorities received different legal advice to Oxford's and hold open discussion at their area committees where parish council members usually attend en masse and they claim get better decisions, more local acceptance of decisions and an all round feeling of compromise giving the better solutions for all. The rationale is that it doesn't matter how much time objectors and applicants spend at any individual stage of the process as the applicant in particular can have all the time they like to argue their case at appeal - that it's the entire process from start to finish that has to be fair to both sides.

Despite an initial increase in time spent in planning as everyone wanted to have their say, in practice, area planning meetings are now quite sophisticated - nobody feels the need to fill five minutes because can because they know anyone else could raise questions and so few are repeated. Good chairing of course helps, something also sadly lacking in Oxford City Council in my experience.

But centralizing planning is one thing, now there are rumours that Labour wants to disband area committees entirely. I hope one of them is reading this and will assure me this is not the case, or that something better will be put in their place. I have long argued that Oxford should reparish the city, shrink the city council effectively to an executive committee and have much more local control through parish or town councils. It's really not that long ago (in its history of over a thousand years) that Headington was administered by the Headington Urban District Council for example. Parish and Town Councils can actually have quite a lot of power - indeed more or less anything a higher level authority wishes to delegate to them.

I was at Thame Town Council a few months ago doing a presentation on Community Land Trusts, and I got the great feeling that this body was one that was prepared to fight its community's corner against the district level council when it mattered. Much moreso than where the committee is really a "branch meeting" of that district and collective responsibility trumps representing your constituents. In other parts of the county parishes precept as much as the district in council tax. Even in the few parts of Oxford where there are parishes it's more like 10% of the district level rate. Headington - or rather the current North East Area Committee area - is half as big again as Thame; easily able to support a stronger more local decision making body if the City Council took its claws out by at least as much!

But again, if the nirvana of local parish councils is not available to them for some reason, there are ways in which area committees can be given real power. Again, colleagues elsewhere only appoint a handful of central portfolio holders on their executive board, and then appoint one member of each area committee as ex officio executive members. Bound by collective responsibility each area committee executive representative can take a decision on a local issue, but which would normally fall under the competence of the executive board, there and then at the area committee meeting, advised by the open discussion amongst councillors and interested public at the area committee. Further, when they are at the executive committee, these area representatives can carry a majority, so if they are mandated by their areas in respect of a proposal by one of the core portfolio holders, they can overrule the core portfolio holders; effectively giving real positive control to those local community meetings collectively.

So, Oxford Labour, I'm sure there's more than just me out there, even if we do not often attend your City Council branch committee meetings, who appreciate the fact that they exist for us if we want to have our say on something, who will be very disappointed if you dismantle this structure and, Jack Straw like, leave it half reformed and more centralized.

Who wants to join a campaign to parish Oxford city then?

...I know we do in Oxford, and I also notice that at least three of the surrounding councils use it, so I presume this is de facto the "market leader" in public access planning application systems on the web. At least at Oxford City, very little appears to have been done to the system since they implemented it six years ago - and that MAY be the council's fault for not upgrading or whatever. However I have two big issues with it that I would like as many councillors from as many authorities as possible to complain about in the hope that their authorities will start to pressure for these changes, one of which would be an enhancement but the other definitely a fix for a non-compliant system in my opinion.

1. It has never worked properly with any browser other than Internet Explorer. In particular, the mapping system does not work in Firefox (2 or 3) or Safari. It may load the first, whole borough map, but if you want to start zooming in to the site you want to look at it refuses to play. In my opinion whilst IE may be the most frequently used browser, it limits users to Windows operating systems now. It will not work properly on any other type of machine - Mac or Linux for example. If yours does work correctly, perhaps you could let me know so I can continue to nag Oxford City Council to get updates or whatever would be needed to get it working. As far as I am concerned by excluding anyone other than Windows users it does not comply at least with the spirit of e-Government.

2. RSS feeds please! At the moment the closest you can get to a regular list is a weekly application list by going through several pages of the site. Here in Oxford apparently they are planning on piloting an e-mail alert system which will necessarily involve people submitting yet more personal information to the council in order to get alerts, and it will no doubt be difficult to change the alert you want (it may for example simply mean sending out the weekly applications list for a ward or some such simple response).

RSS feeds would be far better. They can be made infinitely variable - some people might only want applications in a post code, others for telecoms masts only but borough wide, others for a ward or area committee bundle of several wards. All this should be possible with RSS feeds. Also, many councillors like to keep their constituents in touch by copying "long hand" the weekly list applicable to their ward onto their websites. RSS feeds would allow them to automate this tedious process. I myself am planning a non-council local website, ox2online.net, to complement the area's e-democracy forums and so on, and RSS feeds would be ideal.

So please, if you are reading this and work or are a councillor in any authority that uses this system for public access to planning applications, can you think about these and have a nag at your planning/IT/eDemocracy officers and see if we can't get these changes.

(Oxford City Council appears to be on "Version 7.4")

I feel I've been tagged in a strange sort of a meme for my thoughts on Oxford's recent local election results by Antonia [From Oxford elections round-up]:

We await with bated breath the thoughts of Stephen Tall, no longer Lib Dem councillor for Headington, his colleague David Rundle, and the third-placed Lib Dem candidate for Headington Hill and prolific blogger, Jock Coats.

Well thanks, she just had to rub it in by mentioning that third place. I am embarrassed and humiliated to have come third. There are of course official post mortems to come yet on the campaign, but whatever their verdict, one simple fact is that I am a "bad candidate". Whatever fresh ideas I may have brought to the council (and I doubt my Labour victor will be doing much of that, sad to say), I cannot escape the fact that I hate knocking on strangers to talk politics with them. So for me, the literature and word of mouth amongst people who have met me outside that context is more crucial than for most. Such glad-handing ought to have happened long before the campaign proper started with voter ID canvassing in late March. And been followed up with a leaflet introducing me properly and extolling my virtues before the cross city campaign started with its more party led focus on whole city issues.

Then there was "that leaflet." On the last weekend of the campaign I had the dubious honour of having a Labour leaflet, apparently partly delivered by Mrs Dromey (I rather hope, Antonia, that you were unaware of that leaflet's existence when we exchanged pleasantries on the Friday evening), using quotes from this blog about drugs policy obviously intended to give the impression that if I won I would probably be found standing outside the primary school handing out various narcotics to the year sevens, or perhaps to their parents! Several opponents have commented that they thought it was one of the worst personal attack leaflets they had seen. I suppose I ought to feel flattered that Labour were sufficiently alarmed by my candidacy to feel the need to drag the contest into the gutter.

You can read it for yourself here. By my reckoning, it at least breaches copyright law (my moral right not to have my copyrighted work treated in a derogatory fashion or in a way designed to be prejudicial to the honour or reputation of the author or director), if not possibly electoral law. Enquiries are ongoing. I am not a sore loser, but I was upset by it. I know it cost me both votes and reputation, even amongst my deliverers.

Anyway, enough of the campaign itself. Will I ever try again? I don't know. For many years, since in fact I was last on the council in 2002, I have wondered whether the present system of local government is fit for purpose. As an ideological descendent of the individualist-anarchists and a mutualist, I find the state, in all its guises, terribly coercive. I believe sovereignty should lie with the individual and he or she should only cede power upwards to representatives over things that they cannot arrange for themselves or in small groups or local communities. Local government is so tied down by Whitehall and Westminster that the current arrangements simply cannot be responsive enough to local peoples' needs.

The main reason I wanted to be on the council was to continue to promote, from the inside as it were, my mutualist agenda of hiving local authority functions off onto social, community led partnerships. The more things compete for the crumbs of council budgets within the tight control of Whitehall oversight the less satisfactory the outcome. Leisure services for example cannot hope to compete in quality at least with private providers while it is within the constraints of council budgeting. Similarly, whilst more difficult, I think the solutions to our housing problems are community led, rather than council, landowner and planning led.

Every time I've lost so far I've come out of the contest wanting to do other things that will make a difference one day outside the council structure. Almost as if to prove we can cope without the psychopaths who are so good at saying the right thing at the right time to get themselves elected. This time it is to continue to promote the social enterprise "alternative" for producing social and public goods and to work on promoting local community e-democracy.

• It will be interesting to watch Labour finally explain where they think there is a "£5m cash crisis" at the city council - reading the latest annual accounts I cannot see it myself. But there's another argument for local government reform - despite us being the tax payer/employers their finances are even more opaque than any company's I've ever seen.

• It will be fun to see Maureen Christian defend the Northway Playing fields from something or other she seems to think threatens them (certainly the only "threat" i heard was my own idea to see if we could fit a cricket square on there by budging up the two football pitches and see if we could get a local cricket team going).

• I think it will be a retrograde step if Labour succeed in removing planning decisions from area committees. They were not perfect there, but I have always maintained that was as a result of the bad legal advice that both sides in any disputed application had the right only to speak for five minutes each - where they have open discussion at area committees they manage to get better decisions and more fruitful interplay between applicant and objectors and a better outcome for both.

• It will also be interesting to see whether the Tories, who, despite not winning a single seat managed to come in second in many wards, and at least the ones in which they tried to put up a full campaign, will be able to keep up that level of work, for example, next year, when their declining reputation in control of the county is up for defending.

• And it will be interesting to see whether this marks the high water point for the IWCA, who lost two of their councillors.

• But I also don't really expect the city council, under any party, to set Oxford on fire with bright new ideas that will markedly change the quality of life for its citizens.

Finally, if anyone has any ideas about what little thank you gifts I can get for two teenaged Muslim boys who managed throughout to deliver most of the half of the ward for which we did not have regular deliverers - not a happy situation to be in at the start of a campaign and one of the first things I hope to put right for next time - I'd be very grateful to hear them! Their father has resisted all my requests for his advice so far!