Picture the scene. Half-a-dozen property professionals gathered in the boardroom of a Manchester city centre office to watch the live webcast of a Joint GMCA/AGMA Executive Board meeting. The hosts have provided fruit, pastries and charcoal shots (these, like master developers, are all the rage apparently) for a late breakfast.
'This is the worst party ever’, somebody says.
There was a time when the first talk of two North West property professionals was the Cheshire East Local Plan Strategy. More than that, there is a generation of planners who grew up, professionally-speaking, in the period between a Cheshire East Core Strategy Issues & Options Paper in 2010 and the adoption of a Local Plan Strategy in 2017. I was a bright-eyed, optimistic Associate when I first made reps on that Issues & Options document and a world-weary, cynical Director when it finally got over the line. I am part of a small group of people who saw it all the way through and wonder sometimes whether there will be a club one day. An annual reunion for those who bonded over the trauma of that shared experience, our number depleting year-on-year until only one remains to tell the tale. There was life before it and there was life after it, but it was all-consuming for a while. Planning by soap opera.
Fortunately for me and North West property professionals like me that space in our lives has been filled by the GMSF.
For philosopher Matt Goss the letters H.O.M.E. are important because they personify the word ‘home’. For me the letters G.M.S.F. are important because they personify ‘planning’. The GMSF. is somehow more than a Spatial Framework for Greater Manchester. It is real-time case study of contemporary plan-making. There once was statutory regional plan-making and there will be again one day and future town planning textbooks will use the GMSF to describe what happened in between. Andy Burnham’s dramatic entrance to the stage will be recorded in those textbooks as milestone in the GMSF’s narrative arc.
The 2016 GMSF was not a strong document and it’s incoherence betrayed, if rumours are to be believed, the fact that the GMCA team did not have a complete list of proposed allocations from the ten LPA policy teams until a matter of days before it was published. There was though, at least, support for it across the ten GM authorities, which was no mean feat. Then came the 2017 mayoral election campaign.
It seemed to me (perhaps one day the protagonists in this saga will get together to reminisce and I will find out for sure) that there was so little between Mr Burnham and the Conservative candidate Sean Anstee on issues like health, skills, transport and the digital economy that Mr Burnham and / or his team saw Green Belt as the one area where daylight could be introduced between them. Trafford Leader Anstee struck a welcome (for planners at least) pragmatic tone on Green Belt. Burnham, no doubt well aware that each allocation had a campaign group against it (all of the campaign groups actually came together to march into Manchester city centre only a month before the election), talked about a ‘radical rewrite’ and ‘no net loss’.
This pledge has hamstrung the GMSF since, which is a shame because Burnham did not need that amount of daylight. He won every council by a distance and actually won every ward across the conurbation apart from six. I wonder whether, given the difficulties since of squaring the housing requirement square with the Green Belt circle, he and / or his team regret not taking ownership of the need for some Green Belt release from the outset. It seems not though given his claim that if ministers had allowed councils to plan ‘using the latest official population forecasts he could have reduced Green Belt loss even more’.
That 'no not less' pledge clearly cut thorough. "They don't seem to have listened either to Andy Burnham or to the people that they are supposed to be serving”, says the coordinator of an Oldham action group. "They seem to have come back again with exactly the same plan - if not worse."
If the GMSF is a play (with Mr Burnham in the lead role and us other humble actors in supporting roles) then my sense is that we are the drinks interval. So far, the critics would note acerbically over a gin and tonic, so predictable.
It was apparent from the outset that securing and maintaining the unanimous approval of ten councils and being ambitious on housing growth were mutually exclusive. So it has come to pass.
After a period of relative serenity under producer Howard Bernstein and director Richard Leese, the political tectonics of Greater Manchester are shifting much more quickly. As was noted last year, between March 2018 (when the Greater Manchester Housing Package emerged) and June 2018 (when the GMSF was ‘paused’) were local elections that saw new leaders in Trafford, Oldham and Wigan, in addition to a new leader in Tameside a couple of months before. There are local elections again this year and, as Kevin Whitmore notes here, the three councils that Labour could realistically lose control of in May (Stockport, Trafford and Bolton) have seen large reductions in Green Belt release in this latest draft.
If, perish the thought, the GMSF does not make the anticipated strides forward this year then there may be another reason to delay as the mayoral election 2020 appears on the horizon. Here comes the science part.
At the moment the GMSF is being prepared as a Development Plan Document because the regulations are not fully in place to allow for the preparation of Spatial Development Strategy. My understanding is that the Combined Authorities (Spatial Development Strategy) Regulations 2018 refers to ‘strategic locations’ rather than specific site allocations and that ‘no key diagram or inset diagram contained in the spatial development strategy shall be on a map base’. This is distinct from the usual policies map, which, as per the Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012, must be on an OS map and must be prepared as a local development document. The GMCA hope that a move to a Spatial Development Strategy can be made in the summer once regulations are aligned, which presumably the Government will get around to once the dozens of bills and hundreds of statutory instruments and international treaties required in a ‘no deal’ Brexit scenario have been dealt with. I am sure that this is at the top of Mr Brokenshire’s ‘To Do’ list.
If that is a reason for delay this year, perish the thought, then, come 2020, the GMSF may find itself being dragged back into another SOAN brouhaha. The Government’s proposed approach to the unfavourable impact (favourable for some, of course) of the 2016-based household projections on SOAN was to specify that the 2014-based data continue to provide the demographic baseline; make clear that the lower 2016-based projections do not qualify as an exceptional circumstance that justifies a departure from the standard methodology; and, in the longer term, review the formula with a view to establishing a new method by the time the next projections are published. That could be the summer of 2020 and who knows whether that data will be favourable (or unfavourable). ‘Perhaps we should just wait and see’, somebody might suggest.
Here’s the thing. The GMSF is everything that it is good about a planning. The first Spatial Development Strategy outside of London and a chance to achieve more together than ten LPAs could do separately. A chance, more importantly, to give spatial texture to the devolved areas of public policy that Greater Manchester has become known for. The 2016 GMSF needed a radical rewrite because it did lack coherence. A focus on place, a desire to reduce car travel (with closer alignment to the Transport For Greater Manchester strategy) and ambitions towards a zero carbon economy are as laudable as it gets. In this regard, the GMCA's ‘Doing Things Differently’ strap line is justified.
Here’s the other thing though. The GMSF is also everything that is not good about planning. The rhetoric about becoming a global city is not substantiated by pessimistically planning for as few new homes as possible and there is a real danger, if it is not the case already, that the not good will overshadow the good. Consider, for example, the tawdry spectacle of Conservative councillors warning that the Green Belt is not safe in Burnham’s Labour hands and Burnham bemoaning the Conservative Government for not allowing the 2016-based household projections to reduce the need for Green Belt even further. In this regard, Greater Manchester is doing things just the same as everywhere else.
The GMSF also highlights the Gordian knot that is the Government’s approach to devolution (or centralised devolution). The GMSF plans for a lower level of housing than was included in a Greater Manchester Housing Package less than a year ago, but explicitly refers to the importance of the funds that were the Government’s side of the bargain. Has Burnham and / or his team calculated that the political capital to be gained from lowering the housing requirement and, therefore, reducing Green Belt loss is worth more than £70m of Housing Package funding? What message then, the Government should rightly being asking, would it send to commit to those funds for Greater Manchester when it has already reneged on its commitment to plan for more than the minimum number of new homes?
So the first half of the play was largely predictable. What about the second?
Any development plan document (or spatial development strategy) needs more friends around the examination table than there are enemies. The GMSF is by no means perfect, but Greater Manchester needs a plan and the local plan wheels need to keep turning. Subject to, for example, provisions for safeguarded land, for an early review and for local plans to bring forward additional supply where assumed city (and town) centre development and major urban extensions do not deliver as anticipated, then the development community should be prepared to back the document.
If in parallel the fragile political consensus that got this document published is maintained, built upon, and with NIMBY sting drawn, the GMSF is supported at the most senior levels then it could make it’s way towards adoption. Let’s see if Labour hold Trafford, Stockport and Bolton first, but this course requires the mayor to take more ownership of and responsibility for the GMSF than it might be said he has taken to date. In light of continued hostility from residents’ groups and a seemingly endless electoral cycle, to which audience will the star of the show perform?
It remains, for a certain type of person, absorbing to watch.
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