Planning the Regions TT was the fortunes of the election
that 'decided that this week's Town and Country Planning Association conference on planning Britain's regions should be addressed by a Labour Junior Minister at the Ministry of Economic Affairs and not a Conservative Secretary of State for Trade, Industry and Regional Development.
The truth is that 'in contemporary politics the argument is not for or against planning.' The major political parties now all accept physical planning, including regional planning. The Labour Party has a policy of 'regional planning directed to pro- viding a fresh social environment in keeping with the needs and aspirations of the time.' The Conservative Party's 1964 Manifesto— from which the quotation at the beginning of this paragraph comes—states that the objective of the Conseryative policy for regional planning,was 'to make each region a more effective place to work in and a more attractive place to live in.'
Before it left office the Tory Govern- ment had set up a central organisation and initiated regional surveys of economic and social trends. These covered all regions of the United Kingdom except one. The South-East study and the surveys of Cen- tral Scotland and of the North-East were published a year or more ago. The present Government has carried forward the work, transferring the co-ordinating responsibility from the Board of Trade to the new Ministry of Economic Affairs and promis- ing us an expanded machinery of regional planning boards and regional advisory councils.
The reasons behind this steady move to- wards regional planning were brought out at the TCPA conference. For pioneering the great leap forward started by the In- dustrial Revolution this country has paid a high price. Sprawling towns, congested slums, hemmed-in factories, inadequate street patterns threatened by the mounting tide of cars; and shapeless city centres are common. • It has become increasingly clear that many of these problems can only be solved if tackled on a wider basis than a purely local one. To stop big towns sprawl- ing, 'green belts' are needed outside their boundaries. When a slum area is cleared, one cannot put back the same number as formerly lived there : accommodation must be found for some of them elsewhere— often a great distance away. Yet, left to itself, the great city usually pulls in the opposite direction. The people sprawl outward in search of housing space while employment-creating enterprises crowd inward, drawing the people back from their homes in daily tides of patient commuters. Various remedies and possible controls are known to the planners. For Birmingham and the Black Country Mr. Christopher Cadbury suggested to the TCPA conference that of the three million people to be rehoused one-and-a-half million need to be dispersed to new centres; that a bold new road programme should draw development away westward; and that new regional centres of at least 250,000 inhabitants should be built up as counter- magnets to the Birmingham nexus.
As insistent as the problems within the region are those between the regions. Some are growing only slowly, while others (notoriously the Midlands and the, South- East) expand apace. Contraction of old in- dustries releases population while expan- sion of other jobs attracts it. Much of the so- called 'drift' to the South is self-generated. In Birmingham two-thirds of the new in- dustrial floorspace built recently has been the result of extensions to existing factories. Nevertheless, it is now an accepted principle that expansion of the booming regions should be made to take place in a tidy way, not as an uncontrolled sprawl, and that jobs should, where possible, be steered to other regions. The State also accepts a posi- tive role in establishing 'growing-points' and in heavier public investment for modernisa- tion in the less favoured regions.
All this adds up' to a very strong case indeed for a regional approach and for regional machinery. But here perhaps lurks a danger. It is that the need to maintain, and even strengthen, the status of elected local authorities may be overlooked. Both governments have so far rejected the pro- posal for an executive regional development agency—a proposal far from acceptable to all local authorities. The present govern- ment apparently intends local authorities to implement the views of the regional Nan- ning boards. Preoccupation with regional development should not become an excuse for putting off the (never popular) reform of local government. Local 'authorities will have their part in implementing regional plans. To play that part some of them need to be strengthened, not neglected or quietly superseded by the regional machinery.
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