At Thursday’s Strategy meeting I was confronted with two bits of paper which convinced me once again that this Government is hell bent on reducing local democracy in this country in order to consolidate more power in the centre.
Firstly, we were invited to comment on the huge and very complex Planning White Paper, that the Government has produced, in part to attempt to put right aspects of their 2004 Planning Bill which have not worked very well in practice.
It is known that the Government is concerned about the time that it takes to get large infrastructure projects completed (such as Terminal 5 at Heathrow). They are therefore proposing that, on the pretext of speeding things up, decisions on projects ‘of national importance’ are to be made by an ‘independent commission of experts’, after direct public consultation. No reference at all is to be made to locally elected representatives. I personally have little faith in relying on experts, or in public consultations given the way that they tend to be conducted, so I regard all of this with strong misgivings
Secondly, our attention was drawn to a report from Peter Jones, Babergh’s representative at the Annual General Meeting of the East of England Regional Assembly. Not surprisingly the hot topic under discussion had been the Government’s proposal to abolish this body. Although not directly elected, EERA is made up of elected representatives from Councils around the region and is therefore relatively democratic. The aim however is to transfer its powers to an unelected QUANGO plus a ‘Regional Government Minister’.
Since its creation the EERA has done far more than I expected to defend the East of England against the excesses of the centre, not least in the area of refuting excessive demands for new housing. I fear that what will replace it will simply be an extension of the increasingly long arm of the central planners.
