Infrastructure planning - what you need to know, say and do
October 2009
Infrastructure planning should all be pretty straightforward. PPS12 tells us what is expected. The Planning Advisory Service has published a “how to do infrastructure plans” guide. Easy, yes? Well, no. The snag is that the advice that exists is really quite awkward to carry out in the real world. And secondly, really good infrastructure planning will go wider, picking up local government’s co-ordinating and place shaping role. The danger is getting submerged in the detail of following the handbook, and forgetting that the process is about getting positive outcomes for local communities.
To keep that broader perspective, there are things that it’s helpful for anyone involved in infrastructure planning to know, say, and do.
What’s important to know
Knowing the context is critical. Your infrastructure plan needs to acknowledge just how important and long term the credit crunch is likely to be, and why. The crunch is particularly vicious when developers have bought or optioned land at old (high) prices, but can only sell houses on that land at new (lower) prices. That depresses their ability to pay for the infrastructure they know they’ll need. And, contrary to some of the boosterism in the press, the credit crunch is likely to take a long time to work through the system - land and house prices took a decade to recover following the last recession. The emergency transfusion of cash into the system (in the shape of Kickstart, and historically low interest rates) isn’t going to last. The upshot is that it’s going to be very difficult to get the necessary infrastructure paid for through either developer or public funding.
What’s important to say
There are also things that it’s important to say. You’re going to need to be very clear about what’s ruled in and out of the infrastructure plan. Feedback from the Planning Inspectorate is clear: they don’t want to see a wish-list of projects, so there’ll need to be some careful negotiation with service providers. A good infrastructure plan can’t, on its own, resolve priorities. That’s for politicians. But it can give them the tools they need to plot a way forward. Really elegant project work will also create an Infrastructure Forum, or similar body, where officers can keep alive the inter-agency debate about choices using the momentum from the study.
What you say to the people doing your study also matters. You’re going to have to insist that your study actually amounts to something. There’s too much work out there that mistakes information for intelligence. They’re not the same. Here’s a test: if the people doing your study can’t draw a simple diagram about what they’re going to do and why they’re doing it, then the chances are that they’re already in deep trouble. Likewise, if they get to the end and can’t tell you in a sentence or two what they found out (like, “we can’t afford the infrastructure we need to cope with growth, and the big problem is X”) then they haven’t really finished cooking the thing.
What’s important to do
Finally, there are things that it is important to do. The big one here seems pretty obvious, but does actually get forgotten: you have to use what you’ve found out to improve your planning. For example, you might need to think about your strategy: is your strategy predicated on markets that no longer exist? Do you need to prioritise? Can you bend mainstream funding? Or break sites into short, medium and long term programmes? You’re going to need to think about your policies, too. Like, how do your demands on developer contributions for infrastructure sit with the need for affordable housing, and low-carbon building? Does it all add up? (Answer: almost certainly not).
The big thing to do, though, seems to be to use the infrastructure study to accelerate the cultural shift that is slowly gathering pace in the industry. That’s about development management: moving to a situation where planners are active co-deliverers of positive change. That means a more proactive approach, working alongside developers to ask questions like: what are the barriers to positive change? How do we fix them? What do we do next? When? How? What’s the right public sector role? This will need a different set of business planning tools that are being developed right now.
The common theme to all this is the importance of using that elusive skill of mastering the detail, whilst seeing the bigger picture. If we can get infrastructure studies to help plan-makers and decision-takers do this, then they really will be worth the sweat.
This article is based on a presentation that Andrew Clarke gave at the RTPI’s 2nd Annual Conference on Evidence Base and Monitoring Best Practice on 22 September 2009
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