Town & Country Planning, December 2011
Earlier this year, I went to a fascinating seminar at University College, London, to commemorate the eightieth anniversary of the so-called National Plan. There weren’t that many of us there, but it felt important.
The plan itself remains a fascinating document, published in full in the Weekly Review in 1931 and drafted by a young pioneer called Max Nicholson.
Nicholson was a critical figure in the emerging green movement. As principle advisor to Herbert Morrison after the Second World War, he steered though the 1947 Town and Country Planning Act, created the legislation for Sites of Social Scientific Interest, set up the national parks and launched the Nature Conservancy.
He ran the Nature Conservancy himself, the world’s first statuary conservation body, in the teeth of Treasury opposition. He persuaded broadcasters to make nature programmes, and – realising that conservation required public pressure – helped launch the World Wildlife Fund (as it was then).
Nicholson lived until he was 98 so he had time to criticise his own legacy. He regretted the damage done by industrial agriculture and forestry and he regretted his creation of an intermediary cadre of scientific managers, rather than protecting the environment through the planning system.
The National Plan also inspired the launch of the first UK think-tank, Political and Economic Planning or PEP, which attracted an eminent group of thinkers and businesspeople from Leonard Elmhirst from Dartington to Lord Sieff of Marks & Spencer.
But the legacy of PEP had the same fatal flaw that Nicholson identified later – its technocratic bias, and the kind of bias towards centralisation that you might expect from anything called a National Plan. One of PEP’s other luminaries was the scientist Julian Huxley. His brother Aldous came to some early meetings and then stopped – and they thought no more about him until they saw themselves reflected in the pages of his new novel Brave New World.
It is a strange coincidence, but we are also approaching the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of another attempt at a national plan, published towards the end of 1941 by the magazine Picture Post. It marked the beginning of that growing sense among Britain’s elite that people might find the Second World War just a little less onerous if they could catch a glimpse of the new nation they were fighting for.
The Beveridge Report emerged from a similar thought. It was the biggest selling government report in UK history, so they seem to have got that right.
Both these attempts at national plans have something in common. They were written at moments of extreme national crisis, during coalition governments when politicians were struggling to keep ahead of events. It occurs to me reading the newspapers at the moment – I try not to, but find myself compelled to peep – that we are at a similar moment now.
Yet I see very few signs that anybody is currently working on anything like a national plan, fearful perhaps of its Stalinist overtones and nervous of anything so obviously centralising. But you only have to read the recent remarks of politicians, on both sides of the political divide, to realise that they lack that kind of boldness of ambition and new thinking so badly that the words ‘national plan’ would never pass their lips.
A generation of politicians steeped in the ideas of Milton Friedman and the American think-tanks have left them miserably badly equipped when it comes to boldness. That matters a great deal at a time of crisis, but it matters even more at local level, as so many of our cities wait hopelessly for the Seventh Cavalry in the form of a new Sony factory or a small regional infrastructure project from BIS.
If you can’t write national plans, can you at least consult about them? Unfortunately, the whole idea of public participation in decision-making is seriously suspect among the public and the officials.
A decade ago, the ambitious public participation in the new vision for Seattle went to huge lengths over two years to get input from absolutely everyone at every age – but three quarters of the city population still said they hadn’t been consulted enough (but they liked the plan).
Taken together, this may mean that drafting a national plan seems like something of a dead end right now. But I’m prepared to go out on a limb and urge somebody out there to get drafting, and for three very important reasons.
- It challenges politicians to realise they have the power to imagine the world differently.
- It demonstrates what can be done – and how all those hidden assets (wasted people, wasted land, money or energy leaking away) might be combined to create different kinds of future.
- It encourages local government to get imagining, as they will soon have to do under the Localism Act when it is law.
So somebody needs to revive the spirit of 1931 and 1941 and give us a national plan, not because it can be definitive, but to encourage our towns and cities to exercise their own imaginations – and to realise they are not quite as poor as they thought they were. Perhaps it should be the TCPA.
David Boyle is a fellow of the New Economics Foundation. His new book, The Human Element: Ten new rules to kick-start our failing organizations, was published in October. www.david-boyle.co.uk