five - How the planning system lost its legitimacy, and how to regain it

Summary

Introducing the second reading of the Town and Country Planning Bill in January 1947, Lewis Silkin captured the post-war era’s high hopes for planning. He half-heartedly demurred from the suggestion that the Bill was ‘the most important for a century’ (‘I should not go as far as that’) but said that he was conscious of ‘the great responsibility which falls on me in introducing a Bill of this magnitude and historic character’. It is hard to imagine anyone today talking in similar terms about a planning measure, or matching Silkin’s stirring peroration:

When this Bill becomes law, we shall have created an instrument of which we can be justly proud; we shall have begun a new era in the life of this country, an era in which human happiness, beauty, and culture will play a greater part in its social and economic life than they have ever done before. (House of Commons, 29 January 1947)

I do not suggest that everyone was enthused by planning. Decisions on land use can harm some even as they benefit others. The year before, when Silkin went to Stevenage to tell its residents that it was to become a new town, with a tenfold increase in population, he was jeered at a public meeting (“It is no good your jeering: it is going to be done”) and the tyres of his ministerial Wolseley were let down. The signs at the local railway station were temporarily changed to ‘Silkingrad’ (Kynaston, 2007: 161–2).

Yet, Silkin’s 1947 speech is a reminder of a time when planning was viewed, in Ellis and Henderson’s (2014: 4) words, as ‘more than just a way to help you object to your neighbour’s conservatory. It was focused not just on where we should live, but on how we should live.’ Planning has lost that ambition. It has also lost the muscularity that allowed Silkin and others to establish the new towns. While few would want a return to ‘the man in Whitehall knows best’ mindset, in its place we have the worst of all worlds: a system that has lost public support but is so weak that it is unable to direct development to the most appropriate places or bring forward a sufficient supply of affordable land for development.