‘It’s become a political tool’

The Conservative Party denounced the suggestion as Stalinist, but, unwilling to allow the working class a continuation of inter-war freedoms to build on redundant farmland, came up with an innovative compromise.

A deal was struck with the farmers guaranteeing them payment to produce food for a country facing continued rationing. In return, farmers agreed to give up their rights to sell land with the freedom to develop it.

The 1947 compromise allowed private land ownership to continue, but without the right to build on it. That took the freedom out of freehold, and created a planning system where government reallocated permissions to build through democratically elected local authority planning committees. This also controlled the construction industry, and by extension the materials production industry, without any need for nationalisation.

The Tories added the green belt in the 1950s, a policy that every government has extended since, so that there is now more green belt than there is developed land being lived in.

Today there is a new force at work in planning. Into the political vacuum of the last 15 years created by the collapse of ‘left’ and ‘right’ have rushed the authoritarian environmentalists. Green planning is a naturalistic ideal which wants to reduce human impact, and generally not by creating more efficient industry. That means more regulation by non-governmental organisations, licensed by more institutions of local, regional, national and international government.

Planning is no longer the simple democratic process it was set up to be in 1947, but a frustrating bureaucratic maze. Continuation of the 1947 denial of the freedom to build is justified afresh in 2007 by environmentalists who put their efforts to save the planet above democracy.

Meanwhile, the depoliticised working class have, like the apolitical middle class, become mostly owner-occupiers in the 10% of Britain that is built on. The 30% who don’t own a home mostly want to get out of renting too. While home ownership in 1947 meant security of tenure, today ‘security’ has taken on a financial meaning in a bouyant property market regulated by the planning system.

Denial of the freedom to build is essential to sustaining £4 trillion of existing property ‘value’, which is given moral weight because less building is imagined to sustain more nature. The distopia of environmental disaster now co-exists with the utopia of sustaining a speculative property market.

Planning is now a far less democratic process of allocating rights to build. Only those who can prove that their development will have zero impact on the planet, or on the value of property nearby, are successful.

The planning reforms of 2007 will be a far worse political compromise than the innovation of 1947. In reality, planning is an exercise in social containment of unprecedented proportions. But it could be so much more.