- Email: [email protected]
Country planning?
Viewpoint Country planning? David Green states that planning controls in the UK were formulated by urban dwellers with an idealized and selfish view of the countryside. The legislators noted with disapproval the urban devastation which had brought theirprosperity and resolved effectively to put a freeze on economic growth in rural areas. As a result, urban land has been tight/y, specifically and positively zoned and then designated for rigidly defined development purposes, but beyond the urban conglomerations the land was to remain untouched. Dick Harries has bred and worked heavy horses all his life. His father, grandfather and great grandfather did it before him. He still uses some of their harness. It hasn’t made him rich. Without a sensitive landlord prepared to offer him a tenancy of two rough hill smallholdings of 20 acres and 60 acres and three miles apart’ he would not be able to do it now. His horses and his land do not produce a complete living. Like many in the few truly rural areas that remain in the UK he does a patchwork of jobs that together keep him and his family. By these coincidences, however, his is one of half a dozen remaining farms in the UK still worked with shire horses. For a decade or more television companies wanting the authentic touch have come to film what he does. The surrounding area is beautiful and attracts many holidaymakers. Towards the end of the 197Os, word got around among tourists that if they found their way out from the coast through a maze of tiny lanes, barely sufficient for one car, they could see a man still ploughing, seeding, cultivating and harvesting land with horses. In the first summer, a small number turned up - more next year. Dick Harries is never unwilling to talk to his visitors, but their growing number interrupted his work and clogged the narrow track that runs through his land. Ever one to accommodate to the inevitable, he opened up a field to allow them to park, printed some little leaflets to describe what he was doing and the times when he could be visited, and imposed a charge of fl a head for adults and 50~ for children -
252
which visitors willingly paid. For that price they could come on to his land, see what he was doing, look round the old farmhouse - virtually unchanged for a century - and picnic by the stream. The district council, ever keen to promote tourism, included him as an attraction to its tourist guide. The visitors came in the main holiday months, July and August, perhaps a couple of hundred in all during the year.
More questions In the summer of 1981 Dick had another visitor. He introduced himself as an officer of the planning authority of the same council that was featuring Dick in its tourist guide. He explained that they had received notice from British Telecom that Dick was applying for a telephone for a Shire Horse Centre and asked to see the new buildings Dick was putting up. A little puzzled, Dick explained that he was not putting up any buildings. The official went away. He returned the next day. He told Dick that he would have to apply for permission for the change of the use of his holding to a Shire Horse Centre. He had brought some forms with him and helpfully advised Dick and his son how to fill them in. They were left with the impression that it was all a formality. The following day Dick’s son took the forms into the planning office and paid the fee of f40. A couple of months later they received notice that the application for planning permission had been refused. They ignored it. A couple of months
after that they received a planning enforcement notice requiring them to cease using the farm as a Shire Horse Centre - with the helpful explanation that that meant ceasing to use their land as a rural park and charging admission to visitors.* They then consulted their lawyer, who lodged notice of appeal within the mandatory 2X days. The notice of appeal pointed out fairly forcefully that the established use of the land was agricultural: that rearing horses and working land with them was an agricultural use;” and that merely because a limited number of people in a limited number of months in the year came to watch that use did not change it. It observed that allowing vehicles to park in a field during a couple of months in order to get them off a road which they would otherwise block was not a material change of use of that field for which planning permission was required.’ The planning authority was not apparently embarrassed by that - or by the fact that its own council’s tourist department was actively promoting public interest in the farm. It proceeded to public enquiry. Some unkind things were said about the planning authority at the public enquiry. It was pointed out that there is long established authority that an agricultural use includes the right to set up a retail shop to sell farm produce.5 and. by analogy, that there was no logical reason why a farmer should not sell to the public the opportunity to see what was being done, if they were prepared to pay for it.
Circus Dick’s case was upheld on appeal - at considerable cost. While observing that the position might have been different if he had converted his operation into a circus in which providing entertainment to the public was a primary purpose, the inspector ruled that what Dick was doing did not approach that threshhold. So Dick is still in business. His tourist revenues still make a modest. but useful, contribution to maintaining a near unique example of historic farm techniques.
LAND USE POLICY July 1984
Viewpoint How could it happen? The key lies in the philosophy behind planning law. British planning controls owe their origin to the vision of urban people who looked out upon urban devastation wrought in their own economic interest and vowed to stop it. They were not one whit concerned with the lives or welfare of those who actually lived and worked in rural environments. They were voyeurs, intent upon freezing and preserving for their own relaxation and delectation -when they wanted it - an illusion of a countryside unchanging, beyond the bricks and concrete necessary to their high industrialized standard of living. Urban land was tightly, specifically and positively zoned and designated for particular development purposes, with key colours on planning maps. Open land beyond it was white land, negatively inhibited by the injunction that its use for the time being should remain largely undisturbed. The planners liked to keep their options open in case urban needs required that it should be built upon or carved into. White made later colouring easier. Round the cities, where sizeable numbers of people might see what was going on every day, they went for belt and braces - green belts in fact within which nothing at all was to happen.’ The honey pots of tourism further afield were designated National Parks to achieve the same objective.’ Only the farming lobby was sufficiently powerful and well organized to resist the total suffocation of rural life. Farmers won, and retain, a charmed life. Though later required to obtain planning permission for larger structures, they still qualify for compensation even for those if a refusal of planning permission is upheld after appeal.x They alone may still build houses in open countryside if they can satisfy the Ministry of Agriculture that the house is needed for agricultural purposes and that they possess an agricultural holding which is viable by the ministry’s standards - holdings like Dick Harries’s rarely are of course. Since agricultural purposes include the accommodation of a person last employed in agriculture, many handsome mansions now accommodate retired
LAND USE POLICY July 1984
farmers, offering an entirely new vision of the tied agricultural cottage. In fact a wide range of skills and trades are necessary to the prosperity of any community, but because planning law treats the infrastructure of rural life as exclusively a matter of farming, the reality of rural life has been destroyed in the UK in three decades, in all but a handful of distant communities, by the combination of planning law and economic forces. In green belts, National Parks and other areas where new development has been tightly restricted, commuters and those seeking leisure and retirement accommodation have used the overwhelming economic superiority of their urban livelihoods to buy up virtually every attractive existing house and building not actively in agricultural use. The landscape has been stripped of those actually working among and contributing to the welfare of the indigenous rural population. The planners have cast their beady eyes over hamlets, villages and small towns, designating growth potential in some and none in others.
Condemned Those allowed growth have become commuting ghettoes for those driven off the land. Those denied it have been condemned to death. By the time planning control came into general effect the modern trend towards lower density single generation house occupancy was well advanced in towns. Economic and social factors ensured that it was far slower to develop in rural areas. By the time it did, planning control was well entrenched. Young families seeking accommodation, separate from their parents but in the same community, found their path blocked by restrictions on further development. With no chance of houses in their frozen villages, they left. As village populations aged and the proportion of pensioners rose, the schools closed for lack of children and the shops and public transport facilities for lack of patronage. Energy - in the form of fuel, machinery, transport, fertilizers and pesticides thrown into agriculture, elminated much of the manpower which was its
alternative. The jobs and communal economic contribution which even farmworkers might make to rural life began to disappear. Planning law inhibited the development of alternative rural employment for those thus dispossessed. In particular it did not recognize that in a rural environment a multiplicity of uses may be necessary if any operation is to be economic.
Economic
death
It may be practical and convenient to restrict available urban uses to particular classifications - retail, wholesale, light industrial and so on.’ But this may spell economic death to a rural enterprise. Combining retailing and wholesaling for example may be the only way in which a modern trader can assemble enough turnover to give his retail customers prices which. allowing for the cost of travel, compete with more distant multiple hypermarkets. When it became apparent on the formal inspection of Dick Harries’s premises that he shod his own horses and maintained an impressive blacksmith’s workshop to do it, his representative was not entirely frivolous when he observed to the representative of the planning authority: ‘I suppose now you’ll do him for a light industrial use.’ The planner’s obsession with controls on the small-scale helped to produce big field farming on the largescale. Pardoxically those brave souls who wanted to see things stay as they were in the countryside now gaze impotent as old buildings are razed, hedgerows are torn out, wetlands are drained, ancient woods and pastures are put to the plough and the landscape is raped of every feature that distinguishes it. Much of this could never have happened had the land not first also been raped of all of its people, save those who stand to gain a direct economic advantage from its despoliation. A nation which at times verges on paranoia in security matters, closes its eyes to the growing risk to its security in modern farming. Seven years or more may elapse before natural fertility can be restored if it ceases to be possible to doctor soil with artificial fertilizers, weedkillers
Viewpoint and pesticides. If the UK were deprived of imports as it was in 1940, the country could not now produce an immediate compensating increase in indigenous food production by putting its land to the plough and drawing upon its inherent fertility. Indeed production would collapse.
Crumbling
foundation
Whatever happens, sooner or later the clock will go back. Energy is already in shortage and manpower in abundance. Virtually the whole of industrialized agriculture is shaking perilously on a crumbling foundation of profligate energy usage and accelerating energy shortage. We cannot go on pouring oil and fertilizers into a production of agricultural goods that is so efficient that we cannot consume it, and so costly that we cannot afford to sell it to anyone else. If manpower is not progressively reintroduced to reduce agricultural dependence on energy and imported nitrates, phosphates and potash, production must one day fail for their cost alone. Then only the surviving Dick Harries of this world if there are any - will be in business. We do not have to run these risks. If negative and restrictive rural planning were abandoned in favour of positive policies for rounded rural redevelopment we might for once anticipate the future and avoid some of its worst consequences. Not a lot is required. 0
0
Subject to special conditions, planning permission should be available as of right for residential, residential and business, and business development of any nature required by those who will live in the rural area where it is located and work from it - as it is now for agricultural development. The separate use classifications in existing planning law should be relaxed to allow multiple uses in rural areas where a multiplicity of uses may be a prerequisite of economic survival. “’
Certainly legislation should inhibit the tendency of property to slide out of rural use - a problem already widely
254
experienced with existing ‘tied’ agricultural consents. But it would not be difficult to achieve that. The existing Local Land Charges Register records planning restrictions. The fact that development was permitted by a rural consent could be recorded in it. Continued rural use could be protected very effectively by providing that relevant property subject to a rural consent would be liable to compulsory purchase at its restricted value if it ever passed out of the appropriate rural use. Morover anyone seeking a rural consent should be required to accept rural conditions on all his existing property in the same category. A significant number of those who have obtained permission to build houses tied to agriculture have then sold the houses they replace at a premium for leisure or retirement use on the open market. So long as rural purchasing power remains below urban, such constraints would without doubt create a two tier property market - in which indigenous rural populations traded in restricted property
at prices lower
than
unres-
weigh with those contemplating new rural development, as it frequently does not with present agricultural consents, and would be a useful test of their bonn fides. tricted.
That
would
every way desirable. Achieving it might have some coincidental advantages. It would remove some of the bitter resentment which rural communities feel as their way of life is bought up and extinguished by more prosperous urban second home owners - evidenced at the extreme in the UK by the burning of second homes in Wales, and there might be other less tangible values. The peaceful rural pattern of extended family life, with all its subtle inbuilt social restraints, was carried intact into the cities when people were driven off the land in the 19th century. It was then destroyed by modern urban redevelopment and mounting social collapse and disorder in the cities is a direct consequence. The preservation of that way of life where it remains in rural areas may ensure that some useful templates survive when people finally have to look urgently to solutions to the problems of the cities.” David Green Castle Morris UK
certainly
Devastation If however one accepts the premise that we must get some people back on to the land and begin to repair the devastation of rural community life wrought by the marriage of planning law and economic forces over the last 50 years, then one must also accept that the existence of a two tier market into half of which indigenous rural populations can afford to buy is in
‘Grade V Agricultural Land according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries cl&sificat&. ‘Town and Countrv Plannina Act, 1971, Section 88, tiMSO,* London. 3/hid, Section 290(l). ‘/bid, Section 22(l). 5Williams v Minister of Housing and Local Government (1967) 18P and CR 514. ‘Ministry of Housing and Local Government Circular No 42/55. 7Nationa/ Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, HMSO, London. *Op tit, Ref 2, Section 169 and 8th Schedule. qown and Country Planning Use Classes Order 1972. “‘Ibid. “This theme was first explored by the author in an article ‘Planners must recognise differences between town and country’, The Times, 17 May 1977.
Correction Sharon Burn would like to point out that in her paper, ‘Waterway freight transport: survival or revival?‘, Lund Use Policy, Vol 1, No 2, p 135, the river Weaver was mistakenly included in a list of rivers not under the control of the British Waterways Board. We would like to apologize for any confusion which may have arisen.
LAND USE POLICY July 1984
252
which visitors willingly paid. For that price they could come on to his land, see what he was doing, look round the old farmhouse - virtually unchanged for a century - and picnic by the stream. The district council, ever keen to promote tourism, included him as an attraction to its tourist guide. The visitors came in the main holiday months, July and August, perhaps a couple of hundred in all during the year.
More questions In the summer of 1981 Dick had another visitor. He introduced himself as an officer of the planning authority of the same council that was featuring Dick in its tourist guide. He explained that they had received notice from British Telecom that Dick was applying for a telephone for a Shire Horse Centre and asked to see the new buildings Dick was putting up. A little puzzled, Dick explained that he was not putting up any buildings. The official went away. He returned the next day. He told Dick that he would have to apply for permission for the change of the use of his holding to a Shire Horse Centre. He had brought some forms with him and helpfully advised Dick and his son how to fill them in. They were left with the impression that it was all a formality. The following day Dick’s son took the forms into the planning office and paid the fee of f40. A couple of months later they received notice that the application for planning permission had been refused. They ignored it. A couple of months
after that they received a planning enforcement notice requiring them to cease using the farm as a Shire Horse Centre - with the helpful explanation that that meant ceasing to use their land as a rural park and charging admission to visitors.* They then consulted their lawyer, who lodged notice of appeal within the mandatory 2X days. The notice of appeal pointed out fairly forcefully that the established use of the land was agricultural: that rearing horses and working land with them was an agricultural use;” and that merely because a limited number of people in a limited number of months in the year came to watch that use did not change it. It observed that allowing vehicles to park in a field during a couple of months in order to get them off a road which they would otherwise block was not a material change of use of that field for which planning permission was required.’ The planning authority was not apparently embarrassed by that - or by the fact that its own council’s tourist department was actively promoting public interest in the farm. It proceeded to public enquiry. Some unkind things were said about the planning authority at the public enquiry. It was pointed out that there is long established authority that an agricultural use includes the right to set up a retail shop to sell farm produce.5 and. by analogy, that there was no logical reason why a farmer should not sell to the public the opportunity to see what was being done, if they were prepared to pay for it.
Circus Dick’s case was upheld on appeal - at considerable cost. While observing that the position might have been different if he had converted his operation into a circus in which providing entertainment to the public was a primary purpose, the inspector ruled that what Dick was doing did not approach that threshhold. So Dick is still in business. His tourist revenues still make a modest. but useful, contribution to maintaining a near unique example of historic farm techniques.
LAND USE POLICY July 1984
Viewpoint How could it happen? The key lies in the philosophy behind planning law. British planning controls owe their origin to the vision of urban people who looked out upon urban devastation wrought in their own economic interest and vowed to stop it. They were not one whit concerned with the lives or welfare of those who actually lived and worked in rural environments. They were voyeurs, intent upon freezing and preserving for their own relaxation and delectation -when they wanted it - an illusion of a countryside unchanging, beyond the bricks and concrete necessary to their high industrialized standard of living. Urban land was tightly, specifically and positively zoned and designated for particular development purposes, with key colours on planning maps. Open land beyond it was white land, negatively inhibited by the injunction that its use for the time being should remain largely undisturbed. The planners liked to keep their options open in case urban needs required that it should be built upon or carved into. White made later colouring easier. Round the cities, where sizeable numbers of people might see what was going on every day, they went for belt and braces - green belts in fact within which nothing at all was to happen.’ The honey pots of tourism further afield were designated National Parks to achieve the same objective.’ Only the farming lobby was sufficiently powerful and well organized to resist the total suffocation of rural life. Farmers won, and retain, a charmed life. Though later required to obtain planning permission for larger structures, they still qualify for compensation even for those if a refusal of planning permission is upheld after appeal.x They alone may still build houses in open countryside if they can satisfy the Ministry of Agriculture that the house is needed for agricultural purposes and that they possess an agricultural holding which is viable by the ministry’s standards - holdings like Dick Harries’s rarely are of course. Since agricultural purposes include the accommodation of a person last employed in agriculture, many handsome mansions now accommodate retired
LAND USE POLICY July 1984
farmers, offering an entirely new vision of the tied agricultural cottage. In fact a wide range of skills and trades are necessary to the prosperity of any community, but because planning law treats the infrastructure of rural life as exclusively a matter of farming, the reality of rural life has been destroyed in the UK in three decades, in all but a handful of distant communities, by the combination of planning law and economic forces. In green belts, National Parks and other areas where new development has been tightly restricted, commuters and those seeking leisure and retirement accommodation have used the overwhelming economic superiority of their urban livelihoods to buy up virtually every attractive existing house and building not actively in agricultural use. The landscape has been stripped of those actually working among and contributing to the welfare of the indigenous rural population. The planners have cast their beady eyes over hamlets, villages and small towns, designating growth potential in some and none in others.
Condemned Those allowed growth have become commuting ghettoes for those driven off the land. Those denied it have been condemned to death. By the time planning control came into general effect the modern trend towards lower density single generation house occupancy was well advanced in towns. Economic and social factors ensured that it was far slower to develop in rural areas. By the time it did, planning control was well entrenched. Young families seeking accommodation, separate from their parents but in the same community, found their path blocked by restrictions on further development. With no chance of houses in their frozen villages, they left. As village populations aged and the proportion of pensioners rose, the schools closed for lack of children and the shops and public transport facilities for lack of patronage. Energy - in the form of fuel, machinery, transport, fertilizers and pesticides thrown into agriculture, elminated much of the manpower which was its
alternative. The jobs and communal economic contribution which even farmworkers might make to rural life began to disappear. Planning law inhibited the development of alternative rural employment for those thus dispossessed. In particular it did not recognize that in a rural environment a multiplicity of uses may be necessary if any operation is to be economic.
Economic
death
It may be practical and convenient to restrict available urban uses to particular classifications - retail, wholesale, light industrial and so on.’ But this may spell economic death to a rural enterprise. Combining retailing and wholesaling for example may be the only way in which a modern trader can assemble enough turnover to give his retail customers prices which. allowing for the cost of travel, compete with more distant multiple hypermarkets. When it became apparent on the formal inspection of Dick Harries’s premises that he shod his own horses and maintained an impressive blacksmith’s workshop to do it, his representative was not entirely frivolous when he observed to the representative of the planning authority: ‘I suppose now you’ll do him for a light industrial use.’ The planner’s obsession with controls on the small-scale helped to produce big field farming on the largescale. Pardoxically those brave souls who wanted to see things stay as they were in the countryside now gaze impotent as old buildings are razed, hedgerows are torn out, wetlands are drained, ancient woods and pastures are put to the plough and the landscape is raped of every feature that distinguishes it. Much of this could never have happened had the land not first also been raped of all of its people, save those who stand to gain a direct economic advantage from its despoliation. A nation which at times verges on paranoia in security matters, closes its eyes to the growing risk to its security in modern farming. Seven years or more may elapse before natural fertility can be restored if it ceases to be possible to doctor soil with artificial fertilizers, weedkillers
Viewpoint and pesticides. If the UK were deprived of imports as it was in 1940, the country could not now produce an immediate compensating increase in indigenous food production by putting its land to the plough and drawing upon its inherent fertility. Indeed production would collapse.
Crumbling
foundation
Whatever happens, sooner or later the clock will go back. Energy is already in shortage and manpower in abundance. Virtually the whole of industrialized agriculture is shaking perilously on a crumbling foundation of profligate energy usage and accelerating energy shortage. We cannot go on pouring oil and fertilizers into a production of agricultural goods that is so efficient that we cannot consume it, and so costly that we cannot afford to sell it to anyone else. If manpower is not progressively reintroduced to reduce agricultural dependence on energy and imported nitrates, phosphates and potash, production must one day fail for their cost alone. Then only the surviving Dick Harries of this world if there are any - will be in business. We do not have to run these risks. If negative and restrictive rural planning were abandoned in favour of positive policies for rounded rural redevelopment we might for once anticipate the future and avoid some of its worst consequences. Not a lot is required. 0
0
Subject to special conditions, planning permission should be available as of right for residential, residential and business, and business development of any nature required by those who will live in the rural area where it is located and work from it - as it is now for agricultural development. The separate use classifications in existing planning law should be relaxed to allow multiple uses in rural areas where a multiplicity of uses may be a prerequisite of economic survival. “’
Certainly legislation should inhibit the tendency of property to slide out of rural use - a problem already widely
254
experienced with existing ‘tied’ agricultural consents. But it would not be difficult to achieve that. The existing Local Land Charges Register records planning restrictions. The fact that development was permitted by a rural consent could be recorded in it. Continued rural use could be protected very effectively by providing that relevant property subject to a rural consent would be liable to compulsory purchase at its restricted value if it ever passed out of the appropriate rural use. Morover anyone seeking a rural consent should be required to accept rural conditions on all his existing property in the same category. A significant number of those who have obtained permission to build houses tied to agriculture have then sold the houses they replace at a premium for leisure or retirement use on the open market. So long as rural purchasing power remains below urban, such constraints would without doubt create a two tier property market - in which indigenous rural populations traded in restricted property
at prices lower
than
unres-
weigh with those contemplating new rural development, as it frequently does not with present agricultural consents, and would be a useful test of their bonn fides. tricted.
That
would
every way desirable. Achieving it might have some coincidental advantages. It would remove some of the bitter resentment which rural communities feel as their way of life is bought up and extinguished by more prosperous urban second home owners - evidenced at the extreme in the UK by the burning of second homes in Wales, and there might be other less tangible values. The peaceful rural pattern of extended family life, with all its subtle inbuilt social restraints, was carried intact into the cities when people were driven off the land in the 19th century. It was then destroyed by modern urban redevelopment and mounting social collapse and disorder in the cities is a direct consequence. The preservation of that way of life where it remains in rural areas may ensure that some useful templates survive when people finally have to look urgently to solutions to the problems of the cities.” David Green Castle Morris UK
certainly
Devastation If however one accepts the premise that we must get some people back on to the land and begin to repair the devastation of rural community life wrought by the marriage of planning law and economic forces over the last 50 years, then one must also accept that the existence of a two tier market into half of which indigenous rural populations can afford to buy is in
‘Grade V Agricultural Land according to the Ministry of Agriculture, Food and Fisheries cl&sificat&. ‘Town and Countrv Plannina Act, 1971, Section 88, tiMSO,* London. 3/hid, Section 290(l). ‘/bid, Section 22(l). 5Williams v Minister of Housing and Local Government (1967) 18P and CR 514. ‘Ministry of Housing and Local Government Circular No 42/55. 7Nationa/ Parks and Access to the Countryside Act 1949, HMSO, London. *Op tit, Ref 2, Section 169 and 8th Schedule. qown and Country Planning Use Classes Order 1972. “‘Ibid. “This theme was first explored by the author in an article ‘Planners must recognise differences between town and country’, The Times, 17 May 1977.
Correction Sharon Burn would like to point out that in her paper, ‘Waterway freight transport: survival or revival?‘, Lund Use Policy, Vol 1, No 2, p 135, the river Weaver was mistakenly included in a list of rivers not under the control of the British Waterways Board. We would like to apologize for any confusion which may have arisen.
LAND USE POLICY July 1984