Agenda

How will we learn to distinguish between Kate Barker’s latest review, on land use planning, and her review of housing supply? The latter has been known familiarly as “the Barker Report” or just plain “Barker”. What now – Barker 1 and Barker 2?

Whatever terminology we use, the Bank of England monetary policy committee member has once again stamped her mark on a critical but much neglected facet of British society and how it can be improved and reformed. And this is only her interim report on planning.

As a statement of record, it is an invaluable analysis of the UK planning system. But it is a lot more than that. Although it has been commissioned by the chancellor and the deputy prime minister, it nonetheless smacks of an independence and neutrality that is inevitably lacking when the government makes its case for legislative reform. Gordon Brown, one hazards to suggest, will not have been amused.

Amid the statistics-based evidence of delays in determining major planning applications and public inquiries, there are, for example, some wonderful asides aimed at the government for its own part in the slow pace of the system.

Major infrastructure decisions, the report says, are often very complex and it is no surprise they take so long to determine. “In this context it has been argued that a clearer articulation of national policy could reduce delays,” she writes, careful to attribute this view to a third party.

Not that she would have to look too hard for supporting evidence. Associated British Ports spent £45m on its planning application to build a world-class container port at Dibden Bay on Southampton Water. The planning inspector’s public inquiry alone took 13 months. He refused the application and AB Ports is the subject of a takeover battle.

One factor that might have swayed the Dibden Bay decision in AB Port’s favour was a coherent national ports policy. But the planning inspector had to determine the decision without the framework of a ports policy and so was unable to consider a wider national interest.

Ms Barker is more scathing about recent government efforts at planning reform, wondering why it has taken over two years to update just nine out of the 25 national policy guidance notes, why there are thousands of pages of national policy and guidance, why the local development frameworks are “jargon-laden and over-engineered”.

Barker’s report smacks of a neutrality that is lacking when the government makes its case for reform. Gordon Brown, one feels, will not have been amused

But the real problem for Gordon Brown is that Barker appears to be rewriting the brief laid out by the chancellor. Brown asked her to look at how planning policy can better deliver economic growth and prosperity – in particular, “ways of increasing the flexibility, transparency and predictability that enterprise requires”.

Her response, at this interim report stage, appears to be: “Chancellor, it’s not as simple or as straightforward as that”. While it is important to remove unnecessary complexity in the system, she cautions that where complexity promotes the quality of the planning system, complexity should not be reduced nor speed arbitrarily increased. “Indeed,” she writes, “complexity can add to certainty for investors when it provides useful information.”

The chancellor will have been relieved that a sizeable part of the report at least highlights ways planning reform can assist economic development, notably financial incentives for authorities to adopt a pro-growth agenda, and how local interests, political pressures and perceptions about development hinder enterprise, such as the development of economic clusters.

But Barker has applied her report to a context far broader than one suspects the chancellor envisaged. Several experts believe “Barker 2” is the chancellor’s Trojan Horse for delivering planning gain supplement and possibly more far-reaching reform. Mention of PGS is slight in the interim report – it merits only a bland mention that the government is considering it – as she asks many more questions about the system than she was commissioned to answer.

She is also canny enough to acknowledge that her final report should not be the definitive word on the subject and that other reviews, such as the energy review and the Lyons inquiry into local government, will have implications for planning.

What Barker has done is widen the debate well beyond the confines of HM Treasury. Brown might have expected an economist to take an economist’s perspective, aiding his quest for a fast-moving UK economic engine by undermining a planning system not fit for purpose in a 21st century, productivity-driven Britain.

But those who believe Barker was about to tear the heart and soul out of the UK planning system must have been surprised and delighted to read the following sentence in her foreward: “While this interim review has focused on business concerns, it is clearly vital that the final recommendations do not advance business interests above environmental and social ones.”

One can only wonder what Gordon Brown and the Treasury made of it.