Mr Silkin's fantasy
Christopher Booker This year it seems likely that some £500,000,000 of public money—equivalent to Britain's share of the entire Concorde Programme—will be spent on building new housing in Greater London. Would you not find it passing interesting if an official gov- ernment report suggested that a great deal of this spending might not actually be necessary ? Indeed that, within fifteen years, London could well have between 350,000 and 500,000 houses and flats—as much as One in five of the present total—more than it needs?
Nevertheless, these were just some of the implications of a report which slipped out a few weeks ago under the auspices of the Department of the Environment ('not so much "published" as "released" ', said a spokesman). And it is a slightly hair-raising comment on the level at which Fleet Street covers planning matters that the event re- ceived virtually no attention from the national press at all. Two inches in the Times, a few lines in the Evening Standard, a note in Country Life and that was about it.
Perhaps it is not entirely surprising that the report attracted so little comment. For a start, it was not accompanied by one of those invaluable handouts which enable hard-pressed news editors to gauge the headline-worthiness of such documents without actually having to read them. Sec- ondly, it was released under the almost unbelievably forbidding title of the Develop- ment of the Strategic Plan for the South East Interim Report. And thirdly, the Depart- ment of the Environment itself was pretty sheepish about the whole affair. And this was not surprising at all.
For, the Interim Report is one of the most explosive planning documents ever published. It does nothing less than to call Into question almost every single assump- tion of the most elaborate and expensive exercise in regional planning ever mounted in this country—the so-called Strategy for the South East which, after years of work at a cost of millions of pounds, was finally Published in 1970 and approved by Peter Walker as Secretary of State for the Envir- onment in October 1971.
The origins of the South East Strategy lay Way back in the startling revelation of the 1961 census that the South East of England Was undergoing a massive population explo- sion. The planners virtually went into a panic. Where were all these people going to live? How were they going to be provided with houses, jobs, transport? The first fruit was a weighty document published in 1964 called the South East Study—and as a result of this, successive ministers of Housing and Local Government designated various
'major growth areas' which were to contain the explosion, of which by far the most ela- borate and expensive was to be the vast new city at Milton Keynes.
Throughout the 'sixties, hordes of plan- ners continued their work in even more detail. A firm of consultants, R. Travers Morgan, was commissioned, at a cost of more than £300,000, to produce a 'Land Use Model' based on future population trends for almost every parish. Finally, in 1970 the grand Strategy itself was unveiled, providing for a population increase of at least two and a half million extra people by 1991—and laying down an exact framework to be consulted by every one of hundreds of local authorities, whenever they drew up plans for the future development of their areas.
Of course, it is a pretty open secret what happened. By the early 'seventies, it was already clear that, during the very years when the Strategy was being drawn up, the whole population on which it was based had stopped exploding. And it is now re- vealed by the Interim Report (produced by a joint working party from the DOE and local authorities) that since 1973 the popu- lation of the South East has actually been falling. In fact by 1991, far from an increase of 2.5 million people, the planners now expect that the region's population will be little more than the 17 million it is today.
The egg all over the planners' faces can be imagined. What is to happen to all those 'major' and 'minor' growth areas? What is to happen to Milton Keynes, the new city of a quarter of a million people, to which any-
' What is the point of blowing up the British, they're all so apathetic.'
thing upwards of £1,500,000,000 of capital investment has already been committed ? Already there have been fairly loud mutter- ings from the planning teams in various of the more successful growth areas, like Reading/Basingstoke and mid-Sussex, that they are wanting to pull out of the plan altogether.
But above all, what is to happen to London itself where, as I began by observ- ing, the authorities are still pushing full steam ahead with the largest house-building programme in the country, at a cost of half a billion pounds a year? The Interim Report reveals that in fact London's population is now collapsing at a rate even faster than was hitherto supposed—down a million every ten years. In addition London lost a staggering 30 per cent of its industrial jobs in just eight years, many of them ironically through the closure of firms which had been compulsorily purchased to make way for council housing redevelopment schemes. And by 1981, the report envisages a growing surplus of 'dwellings' over 'households' which by 1991 could amount to between 347,000 and 481,000 flats and houses.
The authors of the report have obviously been too stunned to accept all at once the full implications of the evidence they have uncovered. But amid such chapter headings as 'The Treatment of Uncertainty' and 'The Team's Tentative Views' they do suggest fairly explicitly that perhaps local authori- ties should concentrate on the rehabilitation of existing houses rather than the produc- tion of hundreds of thousands of largely unwanted new ones.
Above all, however, this report drawn up by planners is perhaps the most devastating indictment of the planning profession itself ever delivered in Britain—or at any rate of the kind of grandiose, 'mega-planning' which has been so increasingly fashionable in the past thirty years. Under all the seven main areas of study—the economy, re- source levels, transport, housing, land, pop- ulation and 'implementation of the strategy' —it completely demolishes the 1970 Strat- egy in every respect. As the report itself says, in a kind of diffident apologia, 'it is arguable that we now live in more uncertain times than when planning was established in the late 1940s'. They can say that again!
But it is more than just an irony that the full absurdity of this kind of utopian fan- tasy-thinking should have been finally ex- posed at the very moment when Mr John Silkin's Community Land Act is supposedly about to usher in the golden age of 'positive planning' on an unprecedented scale. It is quite an interesting comment on Mr Silkin's now notorious inability to live in anything other than a world of fantasy that it was in fact he himself who commissioned this interim report in December 1974. And that having done so, he in effect warned that if its findings contradicted the 'growth area' policy he supported in any way, he did not intend to take a blind bit of notice. What a dangerous luxury Mr Silkin has become, to be sure.
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