Local Enterprise Partnerships (LEP) and Local Planning Authorities (LPA) need to have greater co-operation and not be segregated, says the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI).

Richard Blyth, head of policy for RTPI, addressed devolution and housing during ArchitEx 2015, saying that Scotland is a prime example for planning across city regions that northern cities should follow.

He said: “Housing has risen up to be one of the important issues on the general election. It’s estimated that we need something like 260,000 new homes per year in England and last year, 150,000 were constructed and 240,000 given permission so there’s quite a backlog particularly as a result of the recession.

“There is one particular question that is a big challenge in many cities and that is the boundaries are too small.

“If you take a place like Oxford, the boundary of the city is exactly the same as the boundary for the built up area, so there’s no room to expand Oxford at all inside the city and yet it needs to grow a great deal; so the overspill space is in the surrounding rural areas who are very much opposed to housing development.”

A key question posed by Richard was just how cities and its surrounding boroughs can co-operate to build more housing while the city region sees an increase in powers so that everyone benefits.

“This has become an issue, particularly this year because of the devolution to city regions like Manchester and then recently to places like Cornwall, where the government is saying we’ll give local authorities more powers including in some cases, more powers to raise money but provided that they work together; and that’s quite a strong condition.

“This is not something unique to the UK, you tend to find that the cities are much smaller than the conurbations that they’re in the middle of and they all have the same difficulties of how you get everybody to work together.

“The best way to sell the concept of co-operating is to show that people benefit from it and that’s quite a tricky one where you get a city that’s quite successful and the surrounding area is quite economically deprived which has been the case, for example, with Manchester,” he commented.

Richard cited strong public transport as one of the main ways of ensuring that the surrounding boroughs benefit from devolved powers, but most importantly that city regions are allowed to choose who they cooperate with.

He added: “Another thing is that if you’re going to get people to co-operate, it’s best if they workout themselves how to do it, so I’m a little concerned about the Chancellor’s rule that you’ve got to have an elected mayor.

“The best way to get them to co-operate is to ask them how they want to co-operate rather than lay down the rules.

“We recommend that the way of getting local authorities to work together is to make them do it voluntarily, not to rule who’s got to work with whom.

“We think that the economic planning of an area; the number of jobs and the investments needs to be aligned with the number of houses produced and you might think that’s obvious but it often doesn’t happen and you get a very small housing number a very large job number so you need to do your economic and housing thinking together.

“It’s not that great that we’ve got LEPs in one corner and local government in another corner. I think that LEPs should plan their housing along with their economic growth plans.”

Finally, Richard believes that a reward system should be put in place by central government for devolved city regions that cooperate.

He said: “The government should reward areas that co-operate, and we’ve seen this coming and it’s interesting that Whitehall and the UK government is doing a lot of devolution of powers, returning to a situation we used to have where cities had control of their own hospitals and their own transport systems.

“[It’s] an interesting move for a quite right-wing government to introduce. I don’t think they’ve gone far enough, I think they should do more to make the housing relate to the money they spend.”

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