What does the future look like? Flickr/Number 10. Some rights reserved.
Now that last week’s speculation about a hung parliament has been replaced by the certainty of five years’ Conservative rule, it’s time to consider what this means for the issues we’ve been covering in LocalismWatch. The only piece of campaign literature that’s been spared my recycling bin is the Tory manifesto. Manifestos, however, are deliberately crafted as self-fulfilling prophesies aimed at ‘people like you’, whereas localism carries different meanings for different people and places. So it’s with a copy of the manifesto in one hand and a generous pinch of salt in the other that I’ll offer a few preliminary thoughts on what might happen in the next few years and how folk at the grassroots can best respond.
The planning system
Cameron’s manifesto doesn’t talk at any great length about the planning system, which underwent major reforms under the former Coalition. Half a century of statutory guidance was replaced by the 50 page National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF), to which Local Plans must now conform. Regional plans were abolished and a new layer of neighbourhood plans created. But as we’ve previously shown, the new system is far from well-established. Only a tiny proportion of neighbourhoods have a plan in place, and the vast majority haven’t even started the process: they’re all but absent in the big cities. Worse still, only a minority of English councils have an approved Local Plan at all, let alone one that’s up-to-date. That hole in the system acts as an impediment to responsible developers and an incentive to those who’re less so.
