Decisions will be made by an unaccountable body, says Naomi Luhde-Thompson

For the last 60 years, the planning process has been about building consensus around development decisions. But with the government’s Planning Bill, announced in November 2007, this is all set to change.

Radical changes to people’s existing right to be heard on major developments, such as airports and nuclear power stations, will marginalise the voice of the individual and the community representative. Business and industry are essentially getting a system which is heavily weighted in their favour and has been specifically designed to remove a mythical source of delay – community voices.

The current proposals risk breaking public legitimacy and therefore incurring greater delay and uncertainty. Building consensus around the right sort of development to address climate change is essential. The decision making around major infrastructure such as roads, rail, waste and energy should be made more efficient but not at the expense of proper scrutiny, accountability and public engagement.

No automatic right to public hearing

The new procedure does not build on the existing inquiry rules. These provided a right for anyone who has registered an interest to appear in person in an inquiry, to ask questions of the promoter, and to question experts.

The new system introduces National Policy Statements (NPS) which will be drawn up with parliamentary scrutiny and public consultation. However, very few individuals actually respond to national consultation – lack of publicity and time are very real barriers. NPS will set the strategic direction that the development of aviation or roads will take, but they are not obliged by the Planning Bill, as it stands, to take into account climate change considerations.

Once the National Policy Statement has been approved, developers will start to bring forward applications which should be in line with the statement. Before they take the application to the new Commission who will make the decisions, they will run a local public consultation process. There are no safeguards that the information provided in this process is independent, or that the results of the process will be independently monitored. The Commission does have a role in that the developer is required to submit the consultation results and procedure to them. A pre-inquiry meeting is then held by the Commission. The commissioners themselves are expected to be ‘experts’ – perhaps engineers, academics or professionals from various bodies.

This is very different from the existing Planning Inspectorate which currently runs inquiries on major projects. Instead of the automatic right to a public committee hearing, a decision will be taken at a pre-inquiry meeting by the Commission as to whether to hold an oral hearing or to merely take written representations.

No right to have a say

While inquiries can be daunting experiences, it has been proved time and again that most individuals and community representatives are far more comfortable with contributing to such a process in person with an Inspector who is specifically trained to judge their contribution as equal to, if not of greater importance than, the developers’ phalanx of barristers. This right to be heard in person is not contained in the proposed new Planning Bill, nor is the current process of cross-examination.

There is an additional right for an interested party to attend an ‘open floor hearing’. But it is not even clear whether the developer would have to be present at the open floor hearing to hear or answer any concerns or objections.

The Commissioners will then make a decision on the major project, with their primary consideration the National Policy Statement. For instance, with regard to aviation, it may be clear that they have to approve an expansion where an expansion for that region has been set out as policy. They do not have to take into account other policies or possible climate impacts. There is no democratic accountability for this decision as a matter of course.

The new system leaves the general public out in the cold, with no voice in major developments. Instead an unprecedentedly powerful, unelected and unaccountable body will be making the decisions.

Nuclear energy development is one example where public scrutiny has proved vital. Without the cross-examination of evidence by individuals that showed that the developer’s own evidence was flawed, an unsafe nuclear waste disposal site could have been built. The government is again trumpeting the need for nuclear – but this time, with the new Planning Bill, there is no opportunity for this public scrutiny of either the policy or the site-specific issues around nuclear. The right to have a say should not be dismissed lightly.

Naomi Luhde-Thompson is Planning Coordinator at Friends of the Earth