Who has set the planning agenda?

One might lay responsibility at the feet of the planning department’s politicians for not having guided the planning process. We might also blame the civil service, which decides the outcome of the majority of planning applications, and creates the gratuitously pro-active ‘development frameworks’. Blameworthy too is the planning tribunal – so powerful, yet only available as an exploit to the developer. But I do not believe any constitutes the essential cause of the problem. Neither is the Island Development Plan the cause, even if it is pro-development and deficient in its protection of open land.

In fact, many policies of the IDP are interpretable such that they might be used to counter development. Most housing polices, for instance, have parts that we might call ‘subjective’. They stipulate, for instance, that development must be of an appropriate scale, or must maintain the character of the surrounding area.

Policy GP 1 applies to the whole IDP. It stipulates that proposals must not ‘result in the unnecessary loss of open and undeveloped land which would have an unacceptable impact on the open landscape character of an area’. These subjective policy areas could be used to stop development.

Such subjective areas of policy seem tailor-made to allow the IDP to sensitively respond to the community’s needs and wishes, and it is through such policy that the community should be having its say in planning matters (and the deputies should be safeguarding this right). But this is not what we see. Instead, a planning system has emerged that apparently wilfully seeks to ignore community representation and seeks to be sole interpreter of even the IDP’s subjective policy areas.

But although it is the civil service which runs this system, to blame them would be to miss the point. The civil service does what the States instructs it to do. Rather, the essence of the problem is that the States has an aggressive culture of infrastructure development.

It is the States’ culture, under which the civil service labours, that determines how the civil service interprets and utilizes the IDP. To habitually favour development in the interpretation of planning policy, a planner does not have to break planning law, but only has to judiciously work within a culture which constantly impresses upon him or her certain ‘expectations’, and the urgent need for development. The culture is the influencer of everything beneath, such that if the culture changed for the better, the civil service, tribunals and the whole planning culture would fall into line behind it.

The questions we should be asking ourselves are: who is driving the current planning culture that apparently so many find fault with but no one seems able to change; and what are its goals?

It seems obvious that a will is at work – a person or group, either within the States or with the States’ obedient ear – which is proactively maintaining and enforcing the current planning culture.

This culture must have its leaders or motivators who set the agenda. The problem is that these remain silent.

If we only knew who they were, they could share with us their personal vision for the island’s future, and we might get a chance to democratically challenge it.

ANDREW LEE

GY4 6DN.