These are busy times for local government. The Queen's Speech heralds a raft of legislation which impacts directly on councils, from 16-18 education and adult social care to planning, housing, migrancy and climate change. And, further to this list, is the new Local Government Act, passed last week. Local government certainly has no complaints it is being bypassed. For a politician who was never a councillor, PM Gordon Brown appears to have a regard for councils' capacity to help deliver his programme. However, there are inevitable tensions, not least of which is the housing and planning agenda. Among Mr Brown's priorities, housing is apparently top of his list, and he intends ensuring that his legacy will include providing more of it, particularly social and affordable, and especially in the South East. All well and good. But as we can see from headlines last weekend about the National Trust threatening to buy up land to protect green belt, the otherwise-noble goal of providing decent homes is also a political minefield. It could well serve to tip many South East marginal seats fully into the laps of the Conservatives, just in time for a 2009 election. All this is without the problem of lack of infrastructure support for the necessary education, health and transport, with RSG being notoriously slow to catch up on population changes, as we have seen with the migrancy debate. And there is the issue of ‘place-shaping.' For example, at a meeting at the CLG last week, South East councils listened to the targets laid out for them for the number of housing units they must provide as part of the housing growth agenda. But presumably, many of those councils know very well what their residents desire, since, as community leaders, they are already ‘place-shaping.' If so, how does their role in place-shaping square with the Government's insistence that they meet nationally-determined targets which have no bearing on any sense of place, but are simply sets of numbers? If place-shaping is to mean anything, surely it should be up to local authorities, or even clusters of authorities in a given area, to decide and allocate the necessary housing units. Michael Burton, Editor, The MJ
