The Royal Town Planning Institute’s New Vision for Planning promoted the concept of spatial planning in 2000. The enactment of the 2004 Planning and Compensation Act and Scottish planning reforms have given it a major boost. However, there is still a major gap in the hierarchy of spatial plans at a national level: theres is no spatial framework for either UK as a whole or for England within it.

The RTPI has long advocated that this gap must be filled if the nation is to tackle vital investment and development issues that local or regional planning cannot address. In 1999 therefore it established a Working Group to promote it. This gap lies at the heart of concerns about the role of national government in planning processes, brought to the fore in the Barker 2 and Eddington reviews of the planning system and transport in England.

The Need

All regions depend upon core national infrastructure networks, which involve long term national commitment to capital spending and impact on the nation’s economic competitiveness. A national spatial planning framework is essential to achieve an integrated approach to the future of airports, ports, and major road and rail projects. Other essential national infrastructure networks and supply systems, including those for energy, IT, water, knowledge, training and health, cut across the boundaries of established administrative regions and cannot be planned on a local, or even regional, basis.

Without a national framework therefore it is considered that some of the government’s key goals will not be met. These include:

• PSA2 which seeks to reduce the gap in growth rates between all the regions of the UK
• The Communities Plan which seeks to deliver four key growth areas and tackle market failure
• Implementing the findings of the Barker and Eddington Reports
• Tackling Climate Change
• Responding to the new European context for structural funds

The effectiveness of the planning system depends on the clarity of the national policy context within which all plans, whether local or regional, must fit and a UK SPF with associated infrastructure framework plans is an essential but as yet missing contributor to that context.

The Report

A team led by Celia Wong at the University of Manchester has produced a superb report for the RTPI, demonstrating in practical terms just how much benefit governments, policy makers and decision makers would gain from the systematic ordering of broad scale data about the UK to answer 'hard questions' on a spatial base.

As well as demonstrating the benefits of such a framework, the report, assembled by a small team using widely available data and information technology, demonstrates that manipulating policy and decision support data on a UK-wide scale need no longer be a resource-hungry exercise.  A UK SPF would offer wide benefits at limited cost to the nation. 

Action

The RTPI policy team has integrated the output of this work closely into a wide range of its engagements with government, which have included productive meetings with HM Treasury to develop a new policy framework for infrastructure for housing growth in the context of PSR07.  By the end of 2006, references to this work had clearly influenced thinking within the Barker and Eddington review teams about infrastructure planning processes.  The work continues.

• Return to RTPI Policy
• Return to What Planning Does

Attachments: 1

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  Uniting Britain - The Evidence Base (2006) (3.96 Mb)
  05-Jan-07

Author:

Rynd Smith

Publisher:

The Royal Town Planning Institute

Date:

05-Jan-07

Categories:

Policy 

Sections:

What Planning Does

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