Who would have thought that the answer to the housing shortage was to build more supermarkets and shopping malls? Is the Treasury intending to house needy families next to the organic veg? Or was Tuesday’s call from Kate Barker, the Chancellor’s adviser on planning, for a massive transfer of power to big developers, a straightforward capitulation to the CBI and the business lobby? It seems so. For yesterday’s Pre-Budget Report was a salutary reminder for those who have lately been desperate to pretend that environmental and economic objectives can go hand-in-hand. Often they do not.
Labour lost much of its green bravado after being bullied by the fuel protesters in 2000. Yesterday’s performance by Gordon Brown suggests that the Government has still not recovered. Putting 1.2p a litre on petrol has made headlines, but Mr Brown made clear that there would be no return to the fuel duty escalator. His seasonally meek and mild increases in air and fuel duty do little but reverse previous cuts. The doubling of air ticket taxes will raise about £1 billion for the Treasury, but the carbon it expects to save as a result does not even equate to one year’s growth in air-travel emissions.
Perhaps Mr Brown believes that taxes are a blunt instrument when you are trying to change behaviour. But he seemed short on alternative ideas. To state boldly that futuristic zero-carbon homes will be exempt from stamp duty, but to emphasise that this exemption “will be time-limited”, was spectacularly grudging. This, like the announcement that households that generate their own power will not have to pay tax on the surplus energy they sell back to the grid, was a masterpiece of common sense masquerading as vision. Education, frankly, was the thing. And Mr Brown calculates that this is where most votes still are.
The Treasury is devoting quite a bit of energy to forging international agreements to combat climate change. But it must also give serious thought about how to trade off quality of life at home against crude GDP. These two come most starkly into conflict over land use. Ms Barker’s report admits that England is a small, densely populated country. She also states that we have an unusually large proportion of protected land. But the one is surely a consequence of the other: the less open space you have, the more precious it becomes. The question is where to strike the balance. Ms Barker implies that the unprotected land should be fair game for development. This is far too simplistic.
The Government has been astonishingly naive about big business. It spent many years putting corporate leaders on taskforces to distract them from the steady increases in corporation tax and regulation. Many played along, some through vanity and some in the hope of landing lucrative public contracts, which even when they went horribly wrong did not shake ministers’ awe of business. Government was right to worry when Pfizer, for example, complained that it could not find an adequate site in Britain. But the steady moves to abolish local democracy, started by John Prescott in 2002 and backed by every Brown Budget since, are an over-reaction.
Yes, the planning system can be slow: Barker’s report has some good proposals to simplify it. But we desperately need to find a way to value landscape. Delegating that task to “the market” is like asking Pete Doherty to be a Nobel prize judge. The market has no morality. It is good at maximising the return on square footage. But it cannot judge whether generations of delinquent teenagers would benefit from the solitude and wildness of a wide open space or from somewhere to play football, more than from a multiplex cinema. It cannot put a price on a permanent loss of countryside that will affect every generation to come: its interest ends with the first deposit. The old “needs test”, which Barker proposes to abolish, has let local authorities obstruct development. But it is not clear how her proposed central planning commission would fare any better: these decisions will always be political.
It would boost the economy if we had an inalienable right to find a shopping mall even closer to us than an A&E. But in a crowded country, land has to be rationed; the priority must be housing.
I have been in several parts of the country recently where landowners are already building swaths of new homes, under pressure from Mr Prescott. These homes are grudging, uninspiring, often poorly positioned and probably much more vulnerable than their neighbours to the increased subsidence and flooding and freak winds that climate change will bring. To put up such ugly boxes takes only a few months. But they will be there for a century, as will the roads they create and the traffic they generate. With more thought they could have been generating their own energy. They could exemplify the Chancellor’s zero-carbon vision. Instead, they are a depressing demonstration of how lighter planning controls create sprawl.
We already know how to do better. Richard Rogers’s Urban Task Force told us almost a decade ago. It is an extraordinary paradox that a Government that is so keen to legislate everywhere else is so eager to open up precious land with so little idea of what should be built, where it should be built or how to gain public support for it.
Our ministers may be hoping to lead international agreements on climate change. But they are doing next to nothing to convince other nations that we are serious about it at home. And we are in danger of creating a planning regime that will encourage gas-guzzling sprawl that will be with us for a century. End of green and pleasant land. Full stop.
