Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee

Meeting date: Tuesday, April 20, 2010

Official Report 503KB pdf

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Transport and Land Use Planning Policies Inquiry

Good afternoon, everyone. I welcome you all to the 10th meeting this year of the Transport, Infrastructure and Climate Change Committee. I record that we have apologies from Cathy Peattie and Alex Johnstone, and I remind everybody present that all mobile devices should be switched off.

We have six items on the agenda, the first of which is our inquiry into the relationship between transport and land use planning. This is the second evidence session that we have held in our inquiry, and we will have one panel of witnesses in today’s session. I welcome Derek Halden, director of Derek Halden Consultancy, and Professor Angela Hull, from the school of the built environment at Heriot-Watt University. Thank you very much for joining us today. Does either of you have any brief opening remarks that you want to make before we begin the questioning?

That would be helpful, thank you.

I set up DHC in 1996, under the brand “Making Connections”. Since then, most of the work that we have done has been trying to join things up. We have done a lot of joining transport up with everything else, including land use. I am happy to discuss the details of that with you.

I would say so. We waver. The planning system is a political decision-making and administrative system that is not based on law as it is in many European countries. It is delivered by public sector administrators and it is easy for each new Government that comes into power to change planning guidance. You do not have to go through Parliament; you just produce a new guidance note. It is those guidance notes and their clarity that change the planning system.

Absolutely. Competition between local authorities should be used to compete for the very best regeneration schemes as opposed to being used to dodge regulation. If Government sets up the economic levers so that the developers who make the biggest profits are those who deliver in the parts of Scotland that need the regeneration most, that is what we will get. At the moment, the developers making the biggest profits are those who manage to dodge the regulations and say, “Well if Glasgow is saying that, we’ll just nip over the border to West Dunbartonshire,” or whatever. That is why they do it. There is no obtuse reason; it is just that that is what the regulatory framework forces them into.

Representing the Highlands and Islands, I am aware that we have heard a lot about cities. Of course large regional centres suffer the same kinds of problems, but I suggest that, although knowing about travel times between Durness in the far north-west and Inverness might be useful for a small number of people, the developers will still be interested only in making a profit.

Let us not denigrate making a profit. Most local government employees would not turn up for work if they did not get paid. Yes, we all do voluntary work and we all get involved, but profit is an important driver of what actually happens.

The thing that I would say is that public transport delivery in the Highlands is not too bad. The ratio of car travel time to public transport travel time is way below that of, say, some locations on the periphery of Edinburgh, where the ratio of car travel time to public transport travel time just to get to the supermarket is so huge that no one in their right mind would use public transport. Everyone goes by car because it is so much more competitive to go by car. I am saying that there is no reason for things to be like that. In many urban and peri-urban areas, it should be easier to improve the public transport to make viable public transport trips possible.

That ratio of car travel time to public transport travel time, which I cite constantly, was suggested in Chartered Institution of Highways and Transport guidance—published in 1992, believe it or not—as the most important indicator in land use planning decisions. The good practice has been known about for a long time, but no one implements it because people never get round to undertaking major pieces of analysis for the key developments that are going on all the time—the small developments of 20 houses or whatever—on which the planner will need to say either yes or no without having the information to hand. For those type of developments, central Government could make better data available in a whole range of topic areas. A toolkit should be made available to help planners, who have a very difficult job to do, so that they make the right decisions.

Look at the work that we did for the Scottish Government back in 1999, when we mapped out all of Scotland, looked at many of the ratios and compared sites such as Braehead. We showed that Braehead, as an out-of-town development by Glasgow, had a very high ratio of public transport time to car time, which with fairly modest public transport investment could have been reduced very substantially. The piece of work to which I refer is now annex B to planning advice note 75—the work is still there, although it was produced 10 years ago. We have done masses of work since then and loads of other firms have done the same. We could do better than simply to cut and paste, shoving a research report produced 10 years ago into the Government’s current guidance on how to do transport and planning.

You would not want to denigrate your work of 10 years ago and deny that it is perhaps relevant today.

Exactly. It is still relevant but we could do much better.

Having developed some cumulative effects assessments for transport projects in a European project in five cities in Europe, I obviously very much support such an approach. Those cities were part of the CIVITAS II programme, so low-energy demonstration projects were being implemented. The UK example that I looked at was Norwich. Each city had 10 or 11 initiatives. Many of them were about awareness raising and behaviour change. Many were about how you enhance public transport or how you develop second-generation biofuel technology and so on.

It was about assessing the cumulative effects of each project against what is already happening in the city and against the likely future development proposals. What you suggest would be a fantastic idea. The planning system is very weak at monitoring and evaluating planning decisions and the impacts of development proposals, whether for housing or for transport.

You were giving us an example.

It does, but the problem is that people have already made their choices. Where there are regional centres with large supermarkets, people travel there from 100 miles away. It is perhaps all the more urgent that transport plans and development planning are able to accommodate something more sustainable because we cannot afford to have any more build-up of regional centres. But will developers wear decentralisation without having supermarkets of every stamp in every small town? People can eat, drink and use only so much, and the existing competition in very small centres is unbelievable. So, there is a dilemma. The theory of trying to make journeys sustainable is fine, but there is destruction of every other kind of enterprise when a supermarket comes in.

It might be somewhat less.

Leadership is the key to delivery in all of this. I see excellent leadership coming from some individual staff in councils, councillors, the private sector and voluntary groups. The problem is that such leadership is often, rather than being fostered, stifled by the attitude that says that something else is their responsibility. Leadership can come from all over the place. If we create a culture whereby an excellent local government official who is trying to integrate land use and transport is nurtured and supported, we will end up with delivery, rather than end up with leadership that is threatened by a system or an attitude that says, “This is how it must be done.”

On transport, I support the principle of voluntary partnerships of councils getting together. If councils can get together to agree where a housing development is going in Lothian or whatever, that is an excellent way forward. If they cannot do that, we need to be able to ask who else will provide the leadership—it might need to be national Government.

I mentioned patchwork quilt-type solutions. The message from Holland is that we should not constrain people. I have been disappointed that Holland has not made more progress in the past 10 years. What looked on paper to be a fantastic plan-led system for development has not worked well; people have ended up with development in places where they did not want it. They are mulling over why the system did not work. In my experience, systems work best when leadership comes from all over the place. That is one of the real strengths of the systems that we have in the UK, especially in Scotland, where we are often less structured than England, but produce some of the most world-beating solutions as a result. Fostering that approach fits with Scottish culture. I recommend that we nurture really strong leadership, instead of creating a rigorous system around it and trying to make things happen.

What impact does the lack of central or local government control over public transport provision—deregulation, in effect—have on effective integration of land use planning and transport provision?

Could local authorities’ opportunities to discuss new routes or changes to routes be regarded as being a little piecemeal? Would not public sector provision of public transport be more likely to lead to people throughout local authorities having a better understanding of the transport system that would service developments that are going through the planning system? Would such an approach be more likely to give local authorities an incentive to ensure that public transport services are popular and well used? That might turn into a reality the idea that public transport should have a higher priority than private car use has.

Tesco was probably a bad choice of company.

Are the structures in transport and planning effective at local and national levels? Are the right structures in place? If not, how should they be changed?

I have seen some really good joined-up working in the Orkneys, particularly in how Orkney Islands Council is delivering on public consultation across the different public areas. That council is small enough to produce some joined-up thinking.

The question was about the structures that we have in place for remote, rural and island communities. The example that we got was about building on the edge of a town. Do those structures work for remote and rural Scotland and its island communities in the larger sense, as opposed to towns that just happen to be in a rural area?

I am sorry; I am not making clear the whole settlement hierarchy. In the case of a small village, even if someone lives in a remote farmhouse, what matters is the village 2 miles away where they go for their services. How much travel people do depends on what is there and how much development there is. A busy farmer in a rural part of Scotland has to do loads of things. If the local shop is closed or people have to go further to their general practitioner, they might not go.

To take up the example of health care, there has been a big health care initiative around the country simply because busy farmers are too busy to take up preventive health care because the local GP surgery is closed and they cannot take time out to go further afield. So, there are remote surgeries to take services to people.

We are talking about solutions for communities, which is why it is so important that we start at the bottom. It does not matter whether we are talking about a village community in an urban village in a town or in a rural village. We need bottom-up community solutions and to foster the sorts of solutions that can be developed. Unless each council area creates a clear hierarchy in a plan that makes clear the regional and local centres, what the council will underpin and where, it is all going to fall apart.

Does, or should, the planning system have a role in balancing local and national economic development priorities with the development of sustainable settlements and transport networks? How do those competing priorities work out in reality? We touched on the issue earlier, so we do not have to go over it again if you think that the point has already been dealt with.

That leads nicely to my question. Has sufficient attention been paid in transport and land use planning decisions to reducing the need to travel? I am thinking about the provision of easily accessible local shops or allotments, for example. If not, how might travel reduction become a more significant feature of such decisions in the future?

As we mentioned when we discussed the previous question, there are a lot of perverse incentives in the present system. We encourage people to travel more. We need to think of ways of seriously reducing the need to travel through the land use planning system and the transport planning system. That could be done through a stronger planning system and more compact development—we would need to produce workplace and housing developments at a density that would make public transport profitable. To do that without too much public subsidy, we would need developments at a density of at least 40 persons per hectare. That is one approach.

Another way of reducing our need to travel would be to put in place disincentives to travel instead of incentivising it. We could, for example, enforce our speed limits more effectively. Jill Anable and her colleagues did work on that for the Scottish Executive back in 2006. That would be an easy way of reducing our greenhouse gas emissions and our need to travel, as would cutting the speed limits on our motorways and trunk roads to 60mph, as Jill Anable and her colleagues have suggested more recently. We realise that such methods might not be politically acceptable, even though we accept that speed limits are necessary and that they should be enforced.

Another method would be to incentivise means of travel other than cars, the use of which we have spent nearly 100 years incentivising by producing very efficient and fast roads. We could use all the public sector funding and civil service expertise that we use on roads to incentivise other forms of travel and to make our public transport systems more connected. We could incentivise cycling and walking. We could use several different means. We could push in a different direction all the effort that transport engineers put into making roads safe for us—into getting us to use different modes of transport. Behaviour change is a big issue for all us, but if the car is so superior to other modes from the point of view of cost and ease of access, we are more likely to choose the car.

15:00

Thanks. Let us move on. Do you think that planners and transport engineers receive sufficient training in each other’s disciplines during their initial training and throughout their careers, through continuing professional development, to ensure that there is effective cross-discipline working?

And it would be beneficial to tackle that.

I totally agree about the training course requirements. I have also found really valuable some of the work that we have been doing in England with local authorities through action learning. We go into local authorities, speak to the transport people and help them to join up. There is often a psychologist working in their corporate services whom they have never met before. When you start to pull together integrated teams within authorities, they all learn from each other and you end up building a more inclusive team. We did that seven or eight years ago in East Dunbartonshire, and it is no accident that East Dunbartonshire Council has delivered a step change through its integrated delivery initiative and has been successful in the sustainable travel towns programme, which was funded by the Scottish Government. The council was already thinking in a cross-sectoral way.

That is an example of the culture that we can nurture within local authorities. Have they met their planners? Do they really know them or is it all “Please look at this development control application—not enough parking”? How much do they know each other, get under each other’s skins and share problems? Once they do that, things work much better. That is my professional experience.

Over the past five years, local authorities have increasingly been gearing up multidisciplinary teams, especially to work with large development proposals and large developers. I am not saying that there has been a step change, but there is a move towards more multidisciplinary working.

We have covered a lot of different topics. You mentioned the hierarchy of transport modes, from walking and cycling at the top to the use of private cars at the bottom—in theory. I take on board what you have said, but would you like to add anything? What is the purpose of the hierarchy and does it have any impact on planning decisions at the moment?

I add that there is a disconnect between policy and practice. What might we get from a report by the committee? It could list practical measures that could be taken to close the disconnect between policy and practice. The policies are all out there—they have been written for some time. We need a practical toolkit to close that disconnect.

One of the major themes that I would include is the need to have some economic levers for the changes that we are trying to make, as well as the regulatory ones, which are important. No one is making any money from walking. It is continually neglected. Find me a transport practitioner anywhere in Scotland who has done well in their career by focusing on walking. It comes down to hard economic levers. We can understand exactly why that is the way it is and why walking is not prioritised, but when it comes to economic value, it is the other way round. In all the research that we do on economic value, we say that it is about footfall. In planning, we use footfall—the number of walkers—to measure the economic success of a town, but in transport planning, we do not even count how many walkers there are. It is bonkers. It seems to me that walking should be the mode that we concentrate on first—it should be at the top of the hierarchy, as you said—yet we do not even count how many walkers there are. It is terribly important that we get the economic levers right.

What about measuring performance in transport delivery by measuring how much walking there is in an area? We could just about do that, maybe by boosting Scottish household survey sample sizes slightly. It is easily doable and it would wake up the local authorities in Scotland. Think about the difference that it would make if a chief executive of a local authority realised that the authority’s corporate performance depended on walking when all it did was count the number of cars. We should not be surprised that local authority chief executives are interested in getting the volumes of cars up, because that is what matters and what pays tax. A huge amount of the taxation that funds public spending is car tax. Our schizophrenia in transport policy makes many things quite difficult. If we simplify the process by creating economic levers that back up the policy levers, we will start to make strong progress.

I have a slightly different take on that. I think that what we do is very much driven by economic levers. We measure travel time savings, flows of vehicles along streets and stuff, but we do not measure quality of life or people’s health and happiness. For me, that raises big questions, such as, what are public authorities about? How do we define the public good? Instead of defining the public good solely on the basis of gross domestic product, why do we not start thinking about gross value added or about the health of the nation?

If we were to start thinking about issues such as health, education, reskilling the population or the green economy, which might come up later, we would require joined-up thinking. We would need to think about whether we needed to travel, what journeys we needed to take and what we could source from within our local communities, whether they be rural or urban. A different way of thinking would be required, there would need to be a different set of decision criteria and targets, and new data would have to be collected. It is quite difficult for organisations to change all that.

15:15

That takes us to the end of our questions. Some of the answers towards the end will be of relevance to our next agenda item, which is on the next few Scottish budgets. I thank our witnesses very much for their time in answering questions.

I suspend the meeting briefly to allow for the changeover of witnesses and a short comfort break.

15:21 Meeting suspended.

15:25 On resuming—

We can explain who we are, our background and our experience if you would like us to.

Shall I start and Derek Halden can come in? We will do a kind of coxing and boxing, supporting each other.

I do not think that national planning guidance has been strongly against out-of-town shopping centres, although it has wavered and we have had quite a lot of deregulation. The whole planning system is becoming reoriented towards delivering our economic agenda. In his recent speeches, John Swinney, especially, has been saying that it is really the planning system’s responsibility to deliver our 2006 economic strategy. So, that means very much developing where business knows best—where it wants to locate.

Since my time in the planning system—I was practising back in the 1970s—we have seen a weakening of the planning system. It could be argued that we have a much broader consensus about what is right for our cities, rather than a profession called town planning—in the early days, it was architecture and design—trying to identify how best to build what, in those days, it thought would be a sustainable settlement pattern. Now, we have a strong economic growth focus, which has realigned the planning system and brought a lot more developers and investors, both public and private, into deciding on and implementing the strategy. Although we have land use plans, we rely on the private sector to implement those plans, more or less.

It is a difficult area. Ten years ago I might have said to you, “Have a look at the Dutch system; it’s not too bad,” but according to recent research, the Dutch have failed just as badly as we have. There are no easy answers. Your question was about why the position has not got a lot better simply because we put the guidance out there. More than anything, what the development industry, which my firm often works for, cannot afford is uncertainty. If you want certainty that people will be able to access your development, building next to a motorway junction is a resilient and flexible way of ensuring that customers will be able to get there. Here, there has been great uncertainty about whether or not we would have a tram system and what the difficulties might be, and Paradise Street in Liverpool is another example, with questions about the Liverpool trams and potentially enormous—billion-pound—financial burdens for developers that get it wrong.

Angela Hull’s point was that nothing happens unless a developer wants to drive a project. What I am saying is that the way that the rules are stacked at the minute, there is not a lot of risk sharing going on with the public sector to develop in town centres, which is what I would like to see—public-private partners working together, regenerating towns and cities and making city-centre developments happen. That is exactly how Paradise Street in Liverpool started out but, in the end, all the risk ended up with the developer. I would tell people to have a look at the realities of doing business. Then they would see why there are parts of Glasgow where developments go on year after year without happening because the developers are saying, “Actually, let’s just build out of town.” In fact, Glasgow is an unfair example, because people there have worked hard in recent years. I am more looking back at how nothing happened for 20 years in the docklands area next to the Clyde. From day one, we should have been asking how we use our city-centre locations first and then develop out of town if we cannot meet all the needs in town.

Have things moved forward? Yes. Could they move forward a lot further? Yes, they could, and better partnership would help to deliver that.

Is there not also a difficulty given the relationship between different local authorities that share a border but do not share an interest in seeing particular sites developed? Local authorities that share a border might each want the economic development to happen in their patch, even if for reasons of rationality and transport there is a much stronger case for one over the other.

I want to move on and ask about the relationships between national Government and local government and between staff who work on transport and on planning. The Scottish Government’s own research suggests that the links in both relationships are poor and create barriers to implementing national policies. Do you share that conclusion, and what can be done to overcome the barriers?

I would share that conclusion. I have done quite a bit of research with the University of Strathclyde, although I have only been in Scotland and at Heriot-Watt for three years, so a lot of my research is across Europe and in the rest of the UK.

I have done detailed research in five cities in England, where the transport planning procedures are different from those in Scotland. They are highly regulated—the Department for Transport has strict criteria for what it is looking for in the transport plan that it asks each local authority to produce. In Scotland, all authorities produce voluntary transport strategies, so the situation is different.

I have spoken to chief executives and to education, social services, planning and public health people in local authorities, and I have asked them, “How do you produce a better transport environment in your city? How do you work with the transport planners?” They have told me that it is difficult to work with transport engineers as they have a specific culture of doing things and a specific way of communicating. The other professionals in local authorities therefore find it difficult: they are consulted on the local transport plan and they feed in their comments, but they do not see the plan altering in any way.

When I spoke to public health people, I said, “Surely when you develop a new hospital site, you think about cycle networks and good public transport access and infrastructure, such as bus stops.” However, they said that with the financial regimes—with private finance initiative-type solutions to our infrastructure—it is difficult to get involved, as professionals, and to alter a new health centre or hospital design.

Therefore, it is difficult to overcome the barriers, even within the same authority. I spoke to Gordon Mackenzie, the transport convener in the City of Edinburgh Council, about his cycle strategy. I told him that he needs to get the money that is held by other departments to deliver his cycling strategy, but he said that that is very difficult. It is difficult for him to work with the planners and to get them, through section 75 negotiations, to secure better cycle storage and walking environments.

Recognising that the situation is difficult is in some ways the easy bit.

Yes, overcoming the problems is the issue.

Local authorities mimic the level of integration, or lack of it, at national or regional government level. If the departments of the Scottish Government are not integrated, that will be mirrored at local authority level. Each Scottish Government department communicates down with similar personnel in local authorities.

If the Scottish Government can decide what the structure and rules will be for energy efficiency or our reaction to climate change, and if the structure and rules are right and integrated and the vision is aligned with the public funding that is available, that will work its way down and be mirrored at a local authority level. However, if there are contradictions between health or land use planning policy and transport policy, they will be mirrored at a local authority level. It is for the Scottish Government to get its act together at that level.

The planning guidance is exactly what I want to ask about. The Scottish Government recently published the document “Scottish Planning Policy”. Will that revised and consolidated SPP guidance have any positive, practical impact on the planning policies of planning authorities? From the previous answers, it sounds as though the answer is no.

I am fascinated to get an example of the ratio of car travel time to bus route time from near Edinburgh. Can you give us an example of where that ratio is too large?

The cut and paste would be valuable. Does your colleague have anything to say about this general area of the SPP document in relation to reaching the planning authorities that are dealing with transport aspects of development planning and development management?

I think that it is a vast improvement. It went through two consultations and it has improved each time, but there are still internal inconsistencies in the document between the housing section and the transport section. The transport section prioritises a hierarchy of transport with walking first, followed by cycling, public transport, roads and so on. There is a sustainable hierarchy in the transport section, but in the housing section planners are exhorted four times to provide for a generous supply of housing land. They are also exhorted to be flexible to the needs of developers, particularly during the recession, to ensure that there is a continuous supply of housing land. That sparks off problems, because it says that, wherever developers want housing sites to be scattered around the countryside, we should go for it to ensure that there is a supply of housing land coming on the market. It does not suggest much restraint.

Last week I was in a hot air balloon over Perth and looked down at the scattered new housing developments around Perth—groups of 10 or 12 houses are being built only about 5 miles away from Perth city centre. I thought that it would be costly to provide public services in those locations and wondered how often the bus would be going round those little scattered settlements. There will be a lot of car travel. Even though the new SPP is consolidated and provides more certainty for developers, you can still see some internal inconsistencies between its different sections, although it is great with regard to trying to get some cross-cutting themes in relation to climate change. I pushed hard to get good design quality in as well. It did not come through quite as I would have hoped, but there are some cross-cutting themes that hold the different sections together, so I am pleased about that.

We are particularly interested in transport because of the focus of our inquiry. Do you have any specific things to say about Norwich?

Structuring rules—I am copying this year’s winner of the Nobel prize for economics by calling them that—targets and legislation need to be set nationally, but we need to devolve more responsibility to our cities. At the moment, they are just delivery agencies of national Government, so they do not really need to take so much responsibility. Cities, towns and villages are not really responsible for sitting down and thinking about what is best for themselves.

It is about funding, too. We talk about good practice from Europe, but the cities in Europe can raise a lot of money because they own a lot of land. It is, however, difficult to transfer practices from Europe to the UK context.

We need simple indicators and targets. The targets that we have set in the Climate Change (Scotland) Act 2009 on greenhouse gas emissions provide an opportunity. How is the Scottish Government going to devolve to local authorities the target of achieving a 42 per cent reduction in emissions? I know that we have two or three years of thinking before that is going to happen, but it would be really good if, at Government level, we could set that kind of framework of targets for local authorities.

Local authorities need a central requirement, which has to enthuse all the work that they do. If we are to think about sustainable futures, that has to be about resource efficiency or carbon dioxide emissions. They need something to cohere around—something that will help them to think about health, social services, education, transport and land use. The debate on land use planning and transport needs to be wider. We need to think about, and integrate across, several policy sectors.

The question was about leadership. Do you agree that it is about people as well as about objectives and targets?

We have set up a system of strongly controlled competition and profit. That is problematic. Deregulation has created fragmentation. If you want to get a train from Edinburgh down to London, you will probably find two around the hour but will have to wait another 50 minutes for the next one. That is a problem. Although we have had statutory partnerships—very few have been voluntary—it has been difficult for local authorities to improve services. Lothian Buses is one of the few publicly owned bus companies—there are nine—in the UK.

If a market is not regulated, it is in effect a black market. We have regulated bus, rail and all sorts of other operations. The question is, what do we regulate to ensure that consumers are protected, services get better and markets work effectively?

“Control” was the key word in the question. No one party can control transport markets, unless we have a purely state command and control economy. Transport accounts for about 20 per cent of the economy—£1 in every £5. It is an enormous part of the economy, and we cannot control it. However, we can develop partnerships. That takes me back to my first remark this afternoon, which was about getting the right partnerships in place. Partnerships should not be vague or woolly, but should be nailed down, with signed contracts that make clear what one party will do and what the other will do in return. That may mean specifying that an operator will run a bus at 5 o’clock on a Sunday afternoon, which they would not otherwise do. There is no need for a national command and control approach that obliges operators to run such services—things can be done in partnership and contracts can be signed. That type of thinking will deliver better bus and rail services in the future.

The problem is that at the moment it is more common for Tesco to ask Arriva to provide a new bus service for a new store that it is planning than it is for the council to administer such a partnership. Let us make partnerships work and have contracts signed for them, so that they are not woolly. Would that address the issue of control? Control means having a legal document with signatures at the bottom that include those of the bus company that will provide the service, the state, those who secure consumers’ interests, the developers and housing providers—the signatures of whoever is needed to ensure that there is appropriate public transport provision.

In some parts of the country people might regard a Tesco development being threatened as no bad thing. That takes us into another area.

To be fair, the transport system is usually only a means to an end. In this discussion, we are trying to get an idea of what our new communities need to look like so that people do not need to travel. There is an issue around whether people should need to travel to do everything that they would like to do. If people can access services such as schools and hospitals locally in a comfortable way, that will reduce the need for long-distance travel. We have not got there yet.

In the past 10 years, I have read lots of good local transport strategies and interesting local plans. The vision exists, but the reality does not come about. In the past few months, I have been in housing estates across Scotland, knocking on doors, and they all look the same and they all have the same problems that housing estates had 10 or 15 years ago—they are not better connected or more sustainable.

I am interested in the barriers between the plans and the vision that councils come up with and the offering of planning permission in order that they can be delivered. What goes wrong in the middle?

I will take the Orkney example, because the Scottish Government recently published a really interesting piece of research that we did because we had been looking in great detail at the issue through the towns in the smarter choices, smarter places initiative. One of the issues in that research that helps to bring land use and transport integration alive is housing expansion in Kirkwall. At the minute, most people in Kirkwall walk or cycle to the town centre; levels of walking and cycling are above most European levels. We go on about not having European levels of cycling, but we have them in Scotland and they are happening in Kirkwall now. The problem is that, if we build housing on the periphery of Kirkwall, the people will be 1.5 miles from the town centre, so they will drive. Then, the people who live only half a mile from the town centre will find that it has become less pleasant to walk to the town centre so they will also start to drive, so soon, Kirkwall would replicate what has happened in every other town in Scotland.

Our research articulates what goes on in the planning process through natural economic growth and development that means that we end up with everybody burning more oil and with a weaker economy. Through the sustainable travel towns, which is a national Government programme, we are trying to look at the investment in a new way and ensure that solutions are developed so that, if the people on the peripheral housing estates need to drive, they will park at, say, the supermarket on the periphery of the town centre rather than go into the heart of it, so we protect the pedestrianised areas and the quality space.

The question is to ask who pays. Is pedestrianisation of the town centre a direct consequence of housing development? If a planning authority needed to deliver that now, it would face an appeal because it would be investing in part of the town that was not directly related to the development. Therefore, it would lack the funding to invest in the town centre.

We need to work through practical solutions. National Government could do a lot more of that with local authorities, for example through the sustainable travel towns programme. Those two tiers of Government could work through the issue, determine what the problem is and why they cannot do what they want, and they could think about how they could share the problem and jointly deliver the solution. That would not necessarily mean a need for more money. The money might come from the developer or from tools that local authorities already use, such as parking charges, which are a big revenue source for most councils throughout Scotland.

If they succeeded in implementing their transport strategies, most councils would go bankrupt. The bottom line is that most councils in Scotland depend upon failing to deliver their transport strategies because they depend on parking revenue. That is where we are with the lack of joined-up policy in transport and planning: it is as simple as that.

The key point here is that the priorities are not so much competing as they are complementary. In reality, it is all about balance. I have a good example that illustrates that. I am showing my age here, but a few years ago, a Showcase Cinemas complex opened in the east of Glasgow. Someone living in Wester Hailes in Edinburgh who wanted to drive to the cinema could drive to that cinema quicker than to a cinema in Edinburgh. That is such a basic service, especially for youngsters and many other people who rely on public transport, so I wonder how come we are building a world in which the fastest way for people living in the west of Edinburgh to drive to the cinema is to drive to the east side of Glasgow? Okay—we got a cinema in Wester Hailes, which addressed that particular issue, but why was it not planned? For a period of five years, or whatever it was, access to cinemas that we had built into the built fabric right in the heart of Scotland was fuelling unnecessary mileage, because the product at the destination—which involves sitting in a cinema watching a film—is pretty much the same wherever you are. Such travel was a matter of need rather than of choice.









There is nothing wrong with improving strategic transport infrastructure—long-distance links, which many people would oppose—across Scotland, but there is something wrong with improving those long-distance links at the expense of ensuring that local economies are competitive. The burden is to ensure that if we improve a journey time between Aberdeen and Dundee, say, we also invest in ensuring that Aberdeen has a cohesive local economy and that we do not invest in just long-distance links.

That is a significant administrative issue, which goes back to the earlier point about the fact that Transport Scotland currently has all the money; local authorities are starved of money. The money is being spent on reducing long-distance journey times and local authorities are spending less and less on improving local journey times. The result is that there is a real danger that we could be creating in the economy of Scotland a major imbalance that makes us less competitive. Our cities will not be able to compete if everyone has to go elsewhere for everything. We need a bottom-up focus, right the way from the smallest village to the biggest city, whereby we anchor development in the economies of the places that we build.

I have spent a lot of the past 10 years developing what is called accessibility planning. A huge amount of our consultancy work is in England, where people have driven that agenda. We monitor change over time and find out whether journeys are being made easier. For example, we ask, if it takes 25 minutes for an old lady in Barrhead to get to hospital or the shops this year, how long did it take her last year and how long will it take her next year?

We talk about how well connected our communities are, but if we measure that we find the situation that I mentioned in my Kirkwall example. The best locations next to Waverley station and so on are used up, and unless we work hard to avoid the problem arising we will find that it takes longer to get everywhere, because there will be more traffic on the road.

It is very simple—we just measure how long it takes people to get to a shop or a GP, as we have done in Wales. We monitor such things annually in England, under a contract with the Department for Transport. However, that monitoring does not take place in Scotland; it takes place only in England and Wales, where it enables us to see how successful councils are.

If a local shop closes and somebody has to travel further, that is an absolute disaster. We cannot prevent that from happening everywhere, but we can expect every council in Scotland to ensure that its residents do not have to travel more minutes for essential services in a typical week, although sadly, for some, that is exactly what is happening.

Yes, it would be. Higher education is moving towards shorter degrees and more portable qualifications. Masters courses and undergraduate courses are shrinking, and the Scottish Further and Higher Education Funding Council is likely to downgrade the amount of funding for built environment courses. There are lots of issues to think about, especially regarding planning courses. Planners need to be more expert at urban design, they need to understand the property market better and they need to understand transport technologies. There is a lot of pressure on trainers to deliver all of that and produce people who are fit for practice.

We need resources to manage change. It is much easier to manage change in a climate of increasing money, but we face a big challenge in managing change in a climate of decreasing resources. If we manage change, we will get the efficiency gains that we need to fund most of what we need to fund. Ultimately, I am not saying that we need dramatically more resources, but it is hard to see how we can take people with us and persuade them and make it fundable without managing the process.

The visionary way of doing it, if we can, is to create quality-of-life products and start trading in them. The Social Market Foundation lobbied for that last week when it argued that we should give everyone a share in the road network that they can trade. We could start to create social markets and economic growth around that. If we could create the future economic growth of the world in things that we could measure, such as quality of life, I would support that. The reason why I used walking as an example is that it is here now—it is measurable and doable. We could have a shadow market in walking now. How much money the council in Edinburgh gets could depend on the number of pedestrians on Princes Street. That is a practical example of a shadow market in which a council is rewarded financially for driving up footfall. That is the sort of economic market that I am talking about.

We could use parking revenues for that. There is no reason why we cannot take existing revenue streams and optimise and better them. At the moment, the transport departments in most councils do not see the parking revenue—they probably do not even know where it goes. The parking revenue disappears into some hole. Parking is a critical part of managing the transport system but, at present, it is disconnected from managing the transport system. Those are the really critical ways of joining up systems and making the loops work so that we can fund and deliver sustainable transport. The money is there, if we go for it.

Once again, the issue is definitely about disconnect and perverse incentives. Local authorities cannot raise money in many ways, but they can raise a lot from car parking, so they decide to have lots of car parking spaces. However, encouraging more parking in a city centre, or an excess demand for parking, goes against having a sustainable transport system. That is a real issue. However, that is a result of the structure of local government. Councils want to increase their parking revenue and hold on to it, because that is one bit of money that they can control.

Transport infrastructure is important for our towns and cities because it determines urban form and the location decisions in new development. However, funding for large infrastructure is not owned by local authorities—they have to go through hoops and hurdles in Transport Scotland and the Scottish Government. There is no control over infrastructure.

The budgets for cycling and walking are very small. This year, the Scottish Government has £812,000 in its walking and cycling budget. I do not know what that is in relation to the total spend on transport, but I would be surprised if it was as high as 10 per cent. In the past the figure for public transport and cycling and walking was 30 per cent. Has that figure gone up or down in the past two or three years?

The budgets are very small, and we have put local authorities in a situation of bidding competitively for funding, so it is not even a win-win situation for them. There is a finite amount in the budget, so who knows whether a local authority will be the lucky one that draws down most of the money? Local authority transport planners are in the business of drawing down money for their local authority. Unfortunately, the money comes with strings attached, so they might not be able to spend it on what they want to spend it on. They have to spend it on a particular project. The tiers of projects in cities or towns do not necessarily make for a sustainable transport system.

Basically, our funding streams for local authorities have perverse incentives. We could use the total available funding much more effectively and efficiently, but we have to decide what makes for good urban regeneration and good community life. We have to decide and agree on what is in the public good, but we have not done that yet.

I came into town planning via sociology and worked as a practitioner for seven years in both the public and private sectors. I have been doing a lot of research on organisational issues, decision making and policy integration—I have a PhD in policy analysis. Quite a lot of my recent work has been on land use and transport interaction, looking at how authorities, mainly in England and Wales, are trying to produce more sustainable transport outcomes for their cities.

Thank you. For at least a decade or so, national planning guidance has advised against out-of-town shopping facilities that can be accessed only by car, yet many such developments have been approved and are still being approved from time to time. Why is that the case, when national guidance has—at least on paper—been asking us to head in the other direction? Why are we where we are?

So, in the last decade, you would say that there has been ambiguity in the guidance about whether those kinds of developments are required.

Can you suggest anything that provides an opportunity to overcome the problems?

There is some really fantastic local government practice, but unfortunately it is only in 10 per cent of authorities and not even all the time in them. I am a consultant who is outside those authorities but who works with them. We have worked with probably 100 different authorities around the UK on different projects in the past five years, and we have seen fantastic solutions, which make you want to lift them out and use them somewhere else.

Some fantastic stuff is going on. There are strongly integrated teams in which the land use planners work well on a day-to-day, hour-by-hour basis with their transport colleagues to ensure that they resolve the detail of planning applications—parking supply, for example—so that everything works as intended.

The big issue for me—this makes all involved say “Whoa!”—is that a neighbouring authority might steal a key development over the boundary. I would echo Angela Hull’s comment about the need for the guidance to be policed. Either the Government should not bother publishing national planning guidance or it should enforce the guidance that it has published. I believe that Government has a key national stake, but if it wants to publish guidance so that there is not a free-for-all, it should enforce the guidance. If it will not enforce the guidance, it should not publish guidance in the first place because doing so just devalues policy making. At a theoretical level, I think that the national planning guidance is great—apart from the odd word here and there, there is nothing much in it that one would change—but it is not being implemented.

14:15

Rob Gibson will move us on to our next question.

No, I think that the document is a huge improvement because it simplifies everything and puts it under one hat. In the past, the transport people would know only SPP 17—previously called national planning policy guideline 17—whereas now people at least need to trawl through a single unified document to find the transport policy and in doing so might come across something else. For an engineer working in local government, bringing all the planning policies into one document is really helpful.

Ensuring that the planning policies are supported with an effective toolkit is probably the single most important thing that could be done. For economic development, we need to ensure accessible locations. For transport, we also need to improve accessibility and ensure that there are good catchments, which developers want. However, the toolkit that is currently available for understanding and delivering improved access for Scottish residents is next to nothing. National Government has not done very much to support that toolkit.

For example, over the past month or two in Wales, we have helped planners by updating everything so that we could provide the travel time from every house address to 14 types of different service—general practitioners, dentists and so on—by time of day, taking into account congestion on the roads. That is available to download from the Welsh Government website. Why is an Edinburgh-based consultancy such as ours doing that to help land use planning and transport integration in Wales, yet it is not even being attempted in Scotland? Obviously, I come at the issue with some technical expertise, but I suggest that national Government could really help by providing a toolkit that makes it practical to make better decisions at local level.

I could easily be tempted down the route of following up many of those issues about scattered communities. We would quite like to have scattered communities if we can, to enable people to live on their own land in Scotland, much of which has been excluded to them by the approach that individuals have adopted.

Given that other members also need to ask questions, I want to focus on the next question, which is about whether planning authorities should be able to assess the cumulative transport impact of proposed developments rather than having to consider each application individually. If so, how might such a system operate?

About Norwich?

You must remember the historical context of Norwich with its pedestrianised streets. The council will be able to pedestrianise more of the centre when it has completed the northern distributor road and there is a complete ring road. Travel plans are really important in Norwich and the council puts a lot of effort into them, working with companies, schools and the University of East Anglia. We also found that Norwich had a successful car club—there was not a successful one in Malmö, in Sweden—that was able to reduce car usage and travel time. It is very much those behaviour change initiatives that have been successful in Norwich.

Yes. Rural development is one of the most important things for ensuring the sustainability of rural areas. Norfolk County Council has a very effective joint working culture aimed at finding a patchwork quilt of solutions. The fact that something works for one village does not mean that it will be imposed on another village; it is a case of what works well in each area. I was down there just a couple of months ago, helping the council with some work that it is doing on local transport planning. It is also creating rural car clubs—which people say do not work—and electric vehicle car clubs in the city. Lots of really good things are going on.

I was trying to work out why Norfolk County Council is doing so well. A bit like Tesco, the chief executive has a really big thing about every contact with the public or an external stakeholder being treated as a customer contact. The council asks how it can help people and how it can follow up customer service with real quality public service delivery. There are some really fantastic council activities going on, which must be replicated. Most councils are doing something well, but in this difficult area it is a question of how we can make more of those decisions.

In rural development, creating villages of a size that means that they can support a general practitioner and a shop makes all the difference to the amount of travelling that people have to do. When people work locally, underpinning the rural economy, most of their trips will be to get the groceries and, if the local shop closes, the amount of oil that is burned increases by a massive amount. How do we foster community shops or whatever? If we can sustain one, we can then attract more housing to an area and help rural development. It is a joint process that requires proactive engagement by the council in that agenda.

That is an important practical point. If you look at my 10 per cent of Scottish councils, you will find that the settlement hierarchy that is used for public transport interchange in the transport department is not the same as the settlement hierarchy that is used in the planning policy of the same council. For example, it is a very simple, practical thing for Highland Council to ask, “What are our 20 towns? What is a major centre? What is a minor centre?” and to ensure that there are transport hubs where people can connect and have a good wee interchange. That could be the local shop with a cafe, where people can wait and be given good information in a heated area. A local community bus could bring people in and pick up the major bus route. Those things transform access for residents and support rural development. They work—they are working in several councils throughout the country—but why do so few do them?

14:30

Well, 3.2 of them must do. I am sure that we will try to find out.

Is strong leadership required to ensure effective integration of land use and transport planning? If so, who should provide it?

It is about people. That is why I am talking about leadership by the Scottish Government, but I am also thinking about leadership by town councils. The big issues now and in the future are so large that Government has to be big in order to take the lead. I do not think that the private sector will take the lead in addressing some of the big social issues that we will have in the future. Leadership has to come from the public sector. The public sector does a lot on public procurement policies and how public funds are distributed. The public sector can do a lot.

We could go into the wider area of bus regulation. I would be happy to do that now or at any time, because your point about ownership and councils passionately caring about the quality of the bus services in their areas is vital. That matters, above all else.

However, councillors do not insist that councils manufacture the cars or the buses for staff; it is about what councils buy in and how they buy it in. It is about the network of solutions. I am thinking about the clients for whom I work, for example in the retail sector. Are we really going to say to Tesco, which has inadvertently become something like Britain’s fifth-biggest bus operator, because it has to provide bus services when it opens a new store, “Sorry, you’re not allowed to run buses any more”? If we were to say to each Tesco store, “Right, you’re going to pay us a fee to help to run this bus service,” we would end up getting less money into the bus network, because the approach would be opposed. It would become a big deal, in which Tesco would ask, “Why should we pay this fee? It will threaten the whole development.” That would get us into a negative culture.

All I am trying to say is that we can turn that round and have positive partnerships. Tesco needs bus services so that its customers can get to its stores. How can we have got ourselves into a situation in which a large company such as Tesco might regard the possibility of having to pay for a bus service as a threat to its business? Developments need bus services. The provision of such services is not something that the state needs to enforce; it is something that can be done in partnership, because we all need it.

In 2002, when we did the analysis for the “City Region Boundaries Study”, in which we considered economic linkages across Scotland and tried to draw the lines along which we need to plan transport, it was interesting to find overlapping circles everywhere—basically, we have different economies, which are all nurtured. The clear message from that is that we need lots of effective local authorities, which can work in partnership, if they want to do so, for example to consider a regional spatial strategy on which they might all need to agree.

I do not support regional bodies. We need regional spatial strategies, which can be achieved through councils collectively agreeing the structure. Councils can agree on the regional centre and the settlement hierarchy, which will become the transport hierarchy, so work is integrated in that way. We need such work at some level, but Scotland is small enough for there to be no gap between national Government’s provision of a clear overall framework and organisations such as regional transport partnerships, whether or not we need them to exist on a voluntary basis, never mind on a statutory basis. It does not matter to me whether RTPs exist statutorily; what matters is that we should have a framework within which local councils can partner in order to agree regional solutions.

14:45

Have we got the structure right? It is right that we have reasonably small councils, which are able to cope at local level, and a strong national framework. The problem is the lack of clarity. It often seems to me that people are dodging and saying, “This is not an issue that we deal with,” instead of saying, “This is an issue to deal with.” I would prefer to have no ambiguity about who is ultimately responsible: on the land use and transport agenda, there should be absolutely no ambiguity about the facts that responsibility for integration lies with the councils, and that they are held to account by central Government for making integrated transport work better. The minute that we create another tier, everybody can pass the parcel and say, “Oh no. It’s not us. Honest, guv—it’s them,” and we go nowhere. We need clarity of responsibility and to focus it on the local government level. That is my main point.

I agree with much of that. We have our four city regions—our four strategic planning areas—so a broad strategy is being produced there and we have local authorities in place. We have the land use planning structures right, but the structures for transport do not map well on to them, which may be slightly problematic.

Derek Halden would be harder on local authorities and would hold them responsible. The real problem with doing that is that local authorities do not have sufficient funding. They must work within the funding that they have and it is difficult to deliver large infrastructure projects unless the funding is available. That is an issue. If we are to give local authorities strict responsibility, we need to give them the funding to ensure that they can carry it out.

The word “cities” keeps coming up, so I will try to tease out whether the structures that are in place also assist our remote rural and island communities. Do they work for the whole of Scotland, and not only the central belt?

I am really interested in communities and neighbourhoods in terms of ease of access in moving around them, and people getting the services and facilities that they need. That might not be easy in rural communities because they rely on the market to provide those services, but at least rural communities are strong hotbeds for local food sources and other local initiatives. There are very good communications in rural communities.

Our larger urban environments are also centres for economic growth, and there is a real issue around mixed use in our town centres. In particular, fairly fast roads to the centre of town are required, but they can split communities.

There are issues at neighbourhood level. How do we design and plan a well-functioning neighbourhood that has to exist within a busy settlement that might also be a workplace and have transport interchanges? We need to spend time on getting all those different uses to work together so that there are no negative impacts on people who live in towns and cities.

There is one regard in which I am highly critical of my own profession, which echoes the point that Angela Hull has just made: sometimes we give politicians proposals that are not politically acceptable and pretend that they are solutions. That is absolutely outrageous. It is incompetence if a transport planner says, “All you need is road pricing,” or something. That is nuts. It is not a solution at all if it is not politically acceptable. We are trying to navigate towards something that politicians can deliver, which is what being a good professional is all about. The solution must be something that the market can deliver, that is affordable, that is achievable and that the public want.



I agree entirely with what Angela Hull said about incentives. I do not see a lot of evidence of sticks or disincentives being particularly successful. However, if we provide the incentives in the system for businesses and individuals to behave in ways that are positive and good for the economy, we see lots of good progress. That gets into the question of need.

How can we possibly be short of money in transport? Transport is about 20 per cent of the entire economy. The public are spending more than 15 per cent of everything that they earn on transport. I do not agree with the idea that we cannot get them to spend 10 per cent more efficiently and give ourselves an extra £2 billion a year to spend. We should not be short of money in transport. Every time we give the public the opportunity to buy things in transport, such as cars or bikes or parking, they do it in force. We have to find cleverer ways of letting people buy real quality transport. The public do not like being told, “Here’s a stick; we’re going to force you,” just as they do not like being told, “We give our cornflakes away for free, but there’s a stick, which is the cornflakes charge in Tesco,” which is why we do not sell cornflakes that way and, instead, sell them in a marketplace.

That marketplace could involve councils. Lothian Buses is extremely effective and is the best bus company in Britain; the council runs it really brilliantly. I would love to see councils delivering social services. Whether councils deliver services in social or commercial markets does not matter to me; what is important is that we focus on delivering fantastic places that are viable and collect enough money.

People talk about reducing the need to travel, but who says that it is a need or a want? Changing wants is what marketing is all about. Coca Cola persuades us that we want to buy Coca Cola. Is there a need to buy Coca Cola? I do not know. I cannot get excited about this reducing-the-need-to-travel stuff as a concept; I get excited about the prospect of making it really exciting that people want to create and pay for a fantastic transport system. All the evidence suggests that people want to pay for fantastic transport. As a transport professional, I have nothing to be scared of in that regard, because people want good transport.

They probably do not. The annual land use planning course at Heriot-Watt University has transport planning in it, but that is not a requirement of the Royal Town Planning Institute. The Institution of Civil Engineers probably does not require many planning modules in the training of civil engineers, and the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors does not necessarily require planning to be addressed in the training of chartered surveyors. Understanding the different training cultures of those different civil servants is an issue.

It is having an impact. Any large institution is now asked to implement a travel plan when it submits a development proposal. The organisation is asked to think about how workers will get to the workplace and it is required to put in place a plan to reduce car driving to work, particularly sole-occupancy car driving. The organisation could put a car-sharing scheme on its internet site or could encourage employees to cycle or walk more. If it was innovative enough, like Tesco—the choice of Tesco is not a very good example—it could work with the local bus company, or it could even provide its own paratransit facilities, whereby staff are picked up at railway stations and taken to their workplace.

There is probably not sufficient monitoring of travel planning in Scotland to find out whether it is working, but at least it is in place. Using student travel surveys, I have tried to lobby Heriot-Watt University, my employer, for a travel plan that functions well. Travel plans are a normal part of the planning system.

I think that you will find that all councils have a cycling officer who will argue for cycling provision and will lobby within the council for more funding for cycling. There will be someone who will argue for a better public realm and for better environments for walking. Such officers make up a fairly small group in councils. It is quite often par for the course for them to argue, lobby and negotiate for the activities for which they are responsible to receive more funding.

It certainly sounds much more interesting to measure health and wellbeing, rather than just how much parking revenue a council can get. That links to my next question, which is about resources. Is the implementation of national planning and transport policies by local authorities hampered by a lack of resources? Mr Halden suggested that it is not.

I disagree. Mr Halden can argue that we do not need more resources, and I will argue that we do.