The decision by power company EON to postpone construction of the proposed Kingsnorth coal-fired power station in Kent  - New Kingsnorth coal plant delayed‎ - provides some good news, at the same time as the Government’s decision to allow UK Coal to develop an open cast mine in Shropshire provides some bad  : www.cpre.org.uk/news/view/630

Both decisions point to the inadequacy of sustainable energy planning in Britain, and indeed, the need for a UK-wide strategy in the context of devolved planning in Scotland and Wales, together with the prospect of Single Integrated Regional Strategies or SIRS  for the English Regions, albeit that these may not survive a change of government.

Key to such a national strategy will, of course, be the evidence-base, including forecasts and future scenarios. As someone opposed to both the nuclear option and indefinite dependence upon non-renewal resources, I nevertheless accept that there may be a transitional period between the present situation and a “clean energy” end state.

The key questions for me relate to the main components of this transitional period, it’s likely timescale and, most importantly, the likely spatial implications of these including remedial measures. I don’t sense that this information currently exists in any meaningful,coherent and accessible form, and therein lies another problem for energy planning : a rather more serious one in my view than so-called Nimbyism.

Whilst doing a little surfing (of the net rather than the sea) yesterday, I came across a web  ”community” for scientists called Network Nature – www.network.nature.com/groups/futures I was delighted to find a forum on this called “Fight the Future !”, moderated by Nature (the highly regarded scientific journal) writer Henry Gee, and, even more pleased to note that one of the latest forum topics is science fiction.

Now I have to confess to being something of a science sceptic – I know this isn’t fashionable just now ! – and to regarding many “scientific” environmentalists as suppressed technocrats with strong top down planning inclinations. So Mr Gee’s Fight the Future ! Forum, and, indeed, his personal blog, is most refreshing.

This helps me put in perspective the likes of the self-proclaimed leading think-tank on sustainability issues Forum for the Future – www.forumforthefuture.org.uk- which seems to have increasingly become a haven for techno greens and all their science-based visions of the future, based on, I would suggest, a fetishism for forecasts which many more down-to-earth folk might want to fight.

I received notification yesterday that the Planning Inspectorate Panel  Report on the proposed West Midlands Spatial Strategy Phase 2 Revision had been published – Please see link to : www.gos.gov.uk/gowm/Planning/515750/panelreport09/

A full and proper reading of this document by me will have to await my return from a conference – not the Conservative Party’s ! - next weekend at the Centre for Alternative Technology in Macynlleth, Wales. Please see : www.cat.org.uk

The CAT conference is entitled “Power & Place” and its subject is that much talked of (and rather less actioned) theme : locationally appropriate sustainable energy from renewable sources, from which might, incidentally, be derived the rather elegant acronym, LASERS…of which more later.

Returning to the WMRSS Phase 2 Panel Report, I note this refers to “Semantics”, with reference to my own submission, and “Uncertainties” with particular reference to the economy, and to which might be added “political”. However, the key question is whether the Panel’s recommendations are sustainable, according to the various meanings of the word.

Now I have to confess to enjoying the occasional semantic skirmish, and readers of my other blog @ http://janetmackinnon.blogspot.com may see that I was both tickled and tantalised (as the late Ken Dodd might have said) by Lord Mandelson’s use of the words “Flibbertigibbet” with reference to Tory Party Leader David Cameron.

In own humble opinion, however, it is former Deputy Prime Minister, and before that Secretary of State for the Environment, Transport and the Regions – both roles carrying the burden of the planning portfolio – John Prescott  who really conjures up the qualities of a “Flibbertigibbet”.

Partly as a consequence – civic servants and others must still carry some of the can  - quite  a lot of “Flibbertigibberish” (as they might have called it in Diddyland*) has found itself into New Labour planning policy, particularly where issues of sustainability are concerned, and must be cut through (as with LASERS – see above).

* Ken Dodd’s sustainable community for Diddymen

The following article is taken from “Inside Housing” (25.9.2009).

“The 2008/09 accounts for English Partnerships – quietly posted in July on a website that has supposedly been defunct since December – reveal the financial devastation visited on the agency in its last eight months of existence, as it posted an operating loss of £492.2 million. It was so badly hit by the house market collapse it had to seek an extra £67 million of funding from the Communities and Local Government department to continue trading.

Its two divisions – the Commission for the New Towns and the Urban Regeneration Agency – were both absorbed by the Homes and Communities Agency in December. Each organisation prepared separate accounts.

The URA, the main land holding division, was particularly badly hit by the housing market downturn.

It was forced to wipe £263.7 million from the value of its land. Its operating deficit more than doubled from £200 million in 2008 to £406 million in 2009. The agency always ran at a deficit because of the way it was funded.

The Commission for New Towns made a £56 million write-down. It lost £12.6 million in a land deal after a developer which owed it £15 million became insolvent. It got the land back but its value had dropped to £2.3 million.

Overall, the value of the URA’s £719 million land bank in 2008 was slashed by a third over the eight months from 1 April to 30 November, leaving it £481 million of land assets to transfer to the HCA on 1 December 2008.

Communities secretary John Denham will face a barrage of questions over the revelations.

Conservative shadow housing minister Grant Shapps, said: ‘When Parliament returns I will be lining up a series of questions for the secretary of state to uncover the truth behind what looks like a very murky situation. When you find out these things months after the event it becomes difficult to hold the quango to account. Why weren’t we told about this at the time?’

The accounts raised a ‘host of questions’ about how EP assets were transferred to the HCA, he added. ‘I was critical of setting up a mega-quango because it is very difficult to track what is going on.’

An HCA spokesperson said the housing market downturn had left EP with ‘a deficit between anticipated receipts and spending commitments’.

‘This was constantly monitored by EP and the CLG,’ he added. ‘To ensure EP did not breach its allocated budget, additional capital budget cover was requested.’

The extra £67 million of funding was approved at the end of last year. The spokesperson said EP had ‘short-term budget issues’ which the HCA had inherited. ‘Short-term operating budget pressures are not the same as technical insolvency. EP passed £1.8 billion of assets to the HCA on 1 December so was clearly not insolvent.’ A link to EPs’ accounts was posted on the HCA’s website.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Midland_Bank

The subject of regional banking is of considerable interest just now, and I wonder whether a New Midland Bank (see above) might be the best way forward for Central England, as part of the re-organisation of the regions proposed by the Conservative Party (see below).

East Midlands MP, current Shadow Business Secretary and former Chancellor of the Exchequer Ken Clarke might be a good person to progress such a venture, which would, of course, need to be headquartered in Birmingham.

I am speaking, of course, about Conservative Leader David Cameron’s “War on Quangos” announced today. As someone who has generally advocated being “Tough on Quangos, tough on the causes of Quangos”, I am generally supportive of Mr Cameron’s initiative, and one previously announced by Liam Byrne, Chief Secretary to the Treasury. Mr Byrne was formerly Minister for the West Midlands and it is on this region that I want to focus.

However, whilst I agree that we have too much “regional paraphernalia”, here as elsewhere, I do not support wholesale dismantling of this. Indeed, I would have preferred that the Regional Assembly, currently in the process of being abolished by the present Government, had been retained as one of the main instruments of regional policy, but not, I would stress, the only one.

The reason for this is straightforward. Area-based Quangos, as Mr Cameron should be well aware, came to prominence during the reign of Mrs Thatcher in the 1980s, because major urban local authorities, mainly, but not exclusively, Labour-controlled, were regarded as incapable of delivering the scale of regeneration required following the economic re-structuring that occurred during the 1970s. This question of regeneration “capacity” still applies, I would argue, and not just in the major urban areas. Those of us who have dealings with the Shire Counties and District Councils also question whether local government is up to the task of adequately tackling regeneration challenges. Some will respond that this primarily an issue of funding settlements from central government, in which case they should consult Mr Tony Travers of the London School of Economics, who is an expert in this area. However, I’m not so sure.

It seems to me that local government in the West Midlands Shires operates as part of a wider established oligarchy, which includes senior officials from a range of public organisations and key executives from the private sector. In some respects, this arrangement has itself some of the qualities of a Quango, with accompanying lack of transparency and deals done behind closed doors.

The challenges of the present suggest that a more pluralistic approach to regional development is required.This would retain some of the “centres of excellence” associated with Advantage West Midlands (AWM), for instance with regard to the re-development of regionally important investment sites, such as Longbridge. Given AWM’s development role it is not, therefore, appropriate that it should have main responsibility for spatial planning in the region. This should probably fall to a consortium of government agencies, including local authorities, with the Government Office for the West Midlands as lead, notwithstanding currently unsatisfactory policies for housing-based growth.

There is also an important role for more community-based planning – something almost entirely “lost” under New Labour, notwithstanding all the rhetoric around communities, including a supposed government department for these – and for more “bottom-up” (as distinct from top down) approaches to local regeneration. These are usually better value for money and can deliver action on the ground where excessive corporatism (strategic partnerships and like) have patently failed. In short, bring back pump priming !

There is a saying that you should always make the most of a good crisis, and recent events on the UK transport scene suggests that such an opportunity now awaits us.

Today’s transport industry memo, seen by The Guardian, warns of “looming spending cuts” which could lead to schemes being delayed, downsized or scrapped.

This follows yesterday’s announcement on the Government’s take-over of  East Coast Mainline services from private train operating company, National Express.

For my money, I’d like to seen transport expenditure identified in the Government’s ill-conceived “Growth Point Programme” for places like Worcester, reassigned to more sensible projects of the kind identified @
http://worcestercentral.wordpress.com

In addition, much greater attention should be given to development of good intra-regional services, of the kind generally well run by London Midland between Worcester and Birmingham.

My written closing submission is provided below :

This submission comprises 2 parts :
1. Summary of Key Points made to the Examination
2. A New Mercian Hymn (for WMRSS) based on A Re-Construction of the opening to Geoffrey Hill’s Mercian Hymns*

1. Summary of Key Points made to the Examination

My original response to the WMRSS Phase 2 Spatial Options Consultation (2007) identified the need to align the development of options with Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA), and expressed scepticism about the potential scale of housing-based growth, even prior to the subsequent economic downturn.

In the event, the issues of SEA compliance, in relation to the development of spatial options in both the West Midlands Regional Assembly’s Preferred Option and subsequent work for the Government Office by Nathaniel Litchfield and Partners, have been highlighted during the Examination Process.

2. A New Mercian Hymn (for the Regional Spatial Strategy)

King of the West Midlands Heritage, Local Distinctiveness :
Overlord for Sustainable Transport : Architect of
Renaissance in the Major Urban Areas and Telford,
Regeneration in the North Staffordshire Conurbation :
Master of the Strategic Flood Risk Assessment :
Protector of Natural Habitats : Contractor to Location
Appropriate Place-Making in the Shire Counties :
Financier : Manufacturer : Commissioner for Rural
Communities : Friend of the Social Landlord, the Old
And New Economies.

“I like that” said Offa, “SEA EU again”.**

* In the original poem a metaphorical King Offa is part-humorously invoked as the Genius Loci of Mercia/the West Midlands Region
** My poem is also an invocation to Offa, this time re-constructed as Contractor for Eco-Logical Infrastructure and Low-Carbon Development, and, indeed as “Sewer King” – re-calling the Fisher King of Ancient British and Anglo-Celtic Arthurian Myth – to allay the Welsh Assembly’s and others’ concerns about “Water Issues”.

24 June 2009

Further posts (3 & 16 June)  on King Offa & Mercian Hymns can be found @ http://witchofworcester.wordpress.com

The following note should be read in the context of  the series of letters posted on 22 June  in respect of the SEA Directive @ www.planning-inspectorate.gov.uk/pins/rss/west_midlands_phase_two/ 

WMRSS Proposed Phase 2 Revision Strategic Environmental Assessment Directive (SEA)  Compliance Issues  – Note following Matter 1 Hearing

The SEA Directive requires : “An outline of the reasons for selecting the alternatives dealt with, and a description of how the assessment was undertaken including any difficulties (such as technical deficiencies or lack of know how) encountered in compiling the required information” (Par 4.9 Sustainability Appraisal/Non-Technical Summary of Nathaniel Lichfield and Partners (NLP) Report for GO-WM: Development Options for the West Midlands RSS in Reponse to the NHPAU Report October 2008/CD 182)

In the previous paragraph (4.8) entitled “Difficulties” the NLP SA acknowledges the following issues : “….uncertainties in the 2007 SA (for the West Midlands Regional Assembly Preferred Option), limited consultation which may have generated further information, and that spatially specific effects cannot always be identified”.

 In turn, the report by URSUS Consultants for WMRA entitled “Review of the Sustainability Appraisal of the NLP Housing Study Relating to the West Midlands RSS Phase 2 Revision” (CD236) notes a number of difficulties with the NLP study, and observes that : “The (NLP SA) report does not describe the reasons for choosing the options or scenarios…”

This difficulty, I would argue, is also central to the URSUS SA. Moreover, a crucial weakness of the URSUS SA, I suggest, is a lack of evidence that “spatially specific effects” have been have been properly integrated into the process for selecting the “Preferred Option”, which emerges from WMRA’s 3 housing “scenarios”.

On the issue of the “limited consultation” to which the NLP Report “Options” have been subject, this clearly raised difficulties about how far these can be tested through the present Examination, and, therefore, whether a further “Review” process will be required, as I submitted in the context of wider procedural compliance issues.

Of relevance to the above comments is the recent judgement on the East of England Plan SEA, where legal advice indicated that there were legitimate grounds to lodge a challenge, principally on the failure of the strategic environmental assessment to consider reasonable alternatives to the four strategic growth proposals.

The following information is taken from the website of Landmark Chambers (www.landmarkchambers.co.uk) :

“Following a hearing earlier this week [last], Mitting J. has held in response to a challenge by Hertfordshire County Council and St Alban’s District Council under s. 113 of the Planning & Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, that the Secretary of State’s approval of the East of England Plan (RSS for the east of the country) has breached certain requirements for strategic environmental assessment in regulation 12 of the Environmental Assessment of Plans and Programmes Regulations 2004 .

The challenge concerned the decision to require significant additional housing to be met in Hemel Hempstead, Welwyn Garden City, Hatfield and Harlow by means of significant releases of land from the Green Belt without a lawful strategic environmental assessment which considered the reasonable alternatives to the proposals, given the changes made to the policies at the Proposed Changes stage. The Judge rejected the claim so far as it related to Harlow, but upheld the claim relating to the other settlements (and the implications for St Albans). “

WMRSS Proposed Phase 2 Revision/SEA Compliance Issues Respondent 586/Janet Mackinnon/26 May 2007