What does Boris want?
A new London Plan was published last month.
And it got me thinking: why don’t we have a Britain Plan?
The London Plan is a statutory requirement of the Mayor of London. It’s officially a spatial strategy, to be used as planning guidance. But it goes wider than this, and provides vision and targets for the city as a whole.
Reading the latest edition of the London Plan (and I confess, I’ve not read all 542 pages), you get the sense of a government forced to sit down and think about what it’s trying to achieve and how all its different policy areas align to overall goals. The plan has a 20-year time horizon, so the incumbent of a role with a 4-year electoral cycle is forced to coherently describe the London of 2041 they’re seeking to create.
And because it takes a long time to produce the plan (as it has to go through multiple tiers of consultation, both ‘up’ to Government and ‘down’ to the public), Mayors tend to update their predecessor’s plans for their first few years in office. That means you get some continuity of policy, even when the Mayor switches to the opposing party.
We transporty people can immediately see that the overall goal is to increase walking, cycling and public transport mode share from 63% to 80% by 2041. We can see that in the centre of London this means a 5% increase but in the suburbs it means a 15% increase; so it’s obvious where the focus is going to be. We can see that healthy streets are a priority and that there’s a goal to eliminate death and injury on London’s streets. We can also see that bus priority is relegated to paragraph 10.3.11, so is clearly not a priority. In that latter regard, it’s not what I want to see, but at least I know.
Compare all this to Britain.
Is there a Britain plan?
Does anyone know what the Government wants the country to look like in 2041?
Can anyone create a strategic thread through the various policy priorities of the day to a unified set of goals?
There are definitely criticisms you can make of the London Plan. 542 pages is too long and, as a result, there can be a tendency to list every good thing in the world as a goal. That famous quote that might have been Churchill or might have been Mark Twain rather applies: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one”. Being concise is hard (you’re a reader of Freewheeling - you know that!) and the London Plan would be stronger at half the length. It is also too focused on the planning process, reflecting its statutory role as a spatial strategy. In places it’s too vague.
And, obviously, it’s out of date. The plan just published doesn’t include the word “Covid”, as it’s been in the works so long that it’s out of date before it even hits the shelves. But that may matter less than we think.
Dwight Eisenhower’s quote was spot-on: “Plans are useless but planning is indispensable”. Even though the plan just published has been comprehensively overtaken by events, the discipline of being forced to create an integrated plan across all policy areas will mean that London gets more intelligent government than it would do without.
Imagine if the Treasury, Department for Business, Department for Transport, Department for Health (etc) had all had to agree a unified Britain plan to 2041. They’d have reconcile competing and contradictory objectives and all find ways of tying their pet projects to overall goals. Obviously there’d be a lot of game-playing and retro-fitting, but it would still make subsidiary plans like the Bus Strategy more coherent than just dropping them into the world as stand-alone documents.
The London Plan exists because Parliament passed a law saying that it must.
Perhaps, one day, a far-sighted Government will do the same thing at a national level, and bind its successors into actually working out what it’s trying to do before it starts doing them.
Not holding my breath that this is going to be Boris’s priority though…
