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Planning and rural economic development: Does Planning hear the rural voice?

By on 1 March 2013 in economic development, rural

Rural-Blog(Presentation to the Cross Party Group in the Scottish Parliament on Rural Policy, 19 February 2014)
All rural development contributes to the rural economy – including housing, which is often controversial. In fact, rural areas need people in order to thrive and they have capacity to spare. Islay is home to 3500 people. Once there were almost 20,000 Ileachs.

Address the demographic mix, provide affordable and market housing, and we’ll have growing capacity for local products, improved services and enhanced tourism, better access to education and real responses to rural poverty – all in an attractive landscape managed to high standards. Who wouldn’t want that?

So what’s stopping us? Some people blame planning. Experience suggests that CAN be true but not always. Do we have a tendency to see rural areas as no go zones for development? An obsession with driving development to larger towns – a mid-20c response unsuited to many rural areas? Or defensive policy preventing poor quality development, but also stopping everything else?

Happily, NPF3 and SPP are highlighting the rural opportunity. There’s expanded rural content in both draft documents, telling a positive story. But we need to translate this story into action, into delivery on the ground, into local planning which creates the conditions to allow rural enterprise – including housing – to flourish.

We’ve been addressing proactive planning in East Lothian recently, working with Nick Wright Planning (NWP) on the East Lothian Rural Voice report. To inform the Main Issues Report, the Council undertook public engagement in their main towns. Local surveyors Chalmers & Co felt East Lothian’s rural voice should be heard directly, so approached the Council to organise a dedicated workshop. An unusual co-funded event ensued, attended by 40 people – residents, community groups, businesses, farmers, landowners. The conclusion? Planning needs to change.

Alongside this, we’re working (again with NWP) on a pilot project at Winton Estate in East Lothian, where an engagement-led estate wide (1000 acres) Vision is promoting a range of proposals for mineral extraction, visitor accommodation, social enterprise and other uses.

The East Lothian Rural Voice said planning policy is too strict and discourages development. East Lothian Council disagreed at that time. But if people PERCEIVE that planning is too restrictive they won’t even try to develop. That’s a problem. The Council is reviewing the report findings, monitoring the Winton pilot and will test new rural policy options in the Main Issues Report.

There’s no doubt that NPF3 and SPP take a positive stance, articulating the SG National Outcomes. Our LDPs need to do the same, tailoring solutions to suit different needs – some areas need multiple rural solutions. No single size fits all.

Pilot projects, new approaches – rural enterprise zones? – area specific ideas with clear objectives should be trialled. West Lothian’s Lowland Crofting is an well-known, if only partly successful example.

There’s an opportunity for the NPF to express spatial direction on a wider range of rural issues – including demographics and population – joining up thinking and breaking down silos.

And LDPs should integrate economic development and tourism strategies, Single Outcome Agreements and Community Plans. Planning is best placed to bring agencies, strategies and ambitions together, given its cross cutting nature.

We need to foster a positive attitude to rural development, promoting population growth, rural enterprise, local energy solutions. That includes a new attitude on landscape protection and management – North Harris Trust is a good example of a community working hand in hand with SNH.

Policy on development in the countryside needs a finer grain with objective-driven decisions. Weight and balance are needed. Planning is about value judgement and the public interest but that’s obscured by black and white thinking (and political shenanigans sometimes play a part).

Where pressure for housing in the countryside isn’t meeting a local need, some development might be permitted where it can also deliver affordable housing or workspace. Enabling development of this type is not a new concept.

Where rural schools are short of pupils, let’s direct housing and investment to their catchments. Argyll & Bute Council missed an opportunity to address this issue head on recently.

It’s important always to remember that rural residents and communities need to play a central role in driving sustainable place, enterprise and economic success. Recent Cairngorms National Park experience at Tomintoul & Glenlivet is an inspirational example. Increasingly, communities are taking a lead themselves.

Our experience with the East Lothian Rural Voice – and elsewhere – suggests that people don’t fear development or change where it is of a suitable scale and quality and proceeds at an appropriate pace – and where the planning process engages effectively with them.

“Poverty, to be picturesque, should be rural. Suburban misery is as hideous as it it pitiable.” Anthony Trollope, Author, 1815-1882

Richard Heggie

March 2013

Centres of Towns : A Back to Front View

By on 1 March 2013 in Uncategorized

Trust-BlogSaving our town centres – or condemning them depending on your view – is planning’s hot topic. We’ll soon hear from Malcolm Fraser’s Scottish Town Centres Review group. Let’s all hope for useful ideas for action from this cluster of capable contributors.

These days, the prevailing logic is that town centres are no longer retail centres. That may be true in some cases, but certainly not all. Apparently, town centres need a new role: widely held to be as revitalised hubs of civic, social and cultural life. Will all these latte drinking, book borrowing, theatre going, speaker’s-cornerists spend a few quid in the last remaining shops?

The hole in this argument is that whilst many town centres have a failing retail function, they’ve also lost their civic, social and cultural function. Make no mistake, that was always as important as the retail role.

Who could disagree that the civic, social and cultural offer should be rebuilt? Meantime, what are we to do with retail? Do we accept that online shopping, out of town retail, supermarkets and general public apathy are irreversible? Why should we find it easier to stem the decline of civic, social and cultural life than to restore the fortunes of retailing?

In reality, we don’t need new functions for town centres. Most of what is being suggested is a resurrection of previous roles, updated for the contemporary era.

We found in our recent Haddington Town Centre Vision project that the same central zone has been performing a ‘market’ role for almost a millennium. It’s success as an economic and social hub will have waxed and waned many times over the centuries. It dipped in the 1950s and 1960s. It needs another positive intervention now. Fortunately that’s happening, with the formation last week of a new community development trust to lead the Vision.

We take a short sighted, egocentric view of the cycle of town centre success and decline (amongst other matters). Our generation shunned traditional centres, embracing retail parks and supermarket developments, located next to main routes, on the edge or beyond our towns. The planning system claimed to oppose this trend. Looking back, we find the system counter-intuitively did much to accommodate it – and it still does. (Braehead? Silverburn? Fort KInnaird? Pentland?)

We assume supermarkets and online shopping will grow endlessly. Five years ago we believed house prices would always rise exponentially. Twenty years ago there was a bank on every street corner – now they’re coffee houses. Thirty or forty years ago, we still had town centre livestock markets. Change happens – that’s equally true for supermarkets and online shopping tomorrow.

Will our generation see the death of town centres? No. We’re not that important in the overall scheme of things. Our town centres will continue to adapt, as they have over the centuries. Our role is to facilitate the process and perhaps try to see the bigger picture. It’s just a shame that we’ve forgotten how to make positive interventions – or perhaps don’t realise that should be part of planning’s core purpose.

Of course we should revitalise civic, social and cultural activity in our town centres. But we also need a retail fightback. The solution is simple: persuade the residents of a town to spend more money in local shops and ideally on local products. If every household in a typical town of 10,000 people diverted £10 a week away from supermarkets and into town centre shops, they’d benefit from a £2.35m rise in annual turnover.

That single step would transform many of our towns. It should drive our actions and efforts. Once we have these shoppers back in the town centre, we might then think about how we enlist them in that elusive civic, social and cultural remedy.

Finally, we should appreciate that ‘we‘ means not only professionals, businesses, public agencies and traders. People and communities need to be placed back at the heart of town centre regeneration. Each £10 note is precious, every town matters and each of us can make a difference.

“You don’t have to burn books to destroy a culture. Just get people to stop reading them.” Ray Bradbury, Author (1920-2012)

Richard Heggie