Uproar over new planning rules to help build wind farms and nuclear power stations

Radical changes to the planning system to help build wind farms, nuclear power stations and new roads are likely to cause a storm of protest across Britain, Andrew Gilligan reports.

By Andrew GilliganPublished: 9:00PM GMT 31 Oct 2009
The small Welsh village of Brechfa, about ten miles north-east of Carmarthen, has lost its post office and pub – but, if two power companies have their way, it will soon be getting 76 new wind turbines.
Each will rise as high as 145 metres, the height of a 35-storey building, and they will ring the area, making it home to the third-biggest collection of turbines in Britain. There are ten nearby already. Up close, the noise they make is like an idling aircraft.

“They are going to industrialise the countryside,” says Nick Wadham, a local protester against the scheme. Caroline Evans, another resident, says the sound can travel more than six miles.
She had an email from a woman in a nearby village who said she had not slept for three nights after the turbines were installed.
But this battle is not just another local campaign. Brechfa is on the front line of perhaps the most dramatic change to the British planning system in two generations.
Its 43-turbine wind farm, and a 33-turbine scheme at next-door Llanllwni, will be among the first projects decided under radically new arrangements: about to come into force, as yet unnoticed by the general public, but likely to cause a storm of protest across the countryside.
From March, all planning applications for “major national infrastructure” – including larger wind farms, trunk roads, power stations, ports, airport expansion and overhead pylon lines – will be decided not by local councillors, or ministers, but by a new unelected “superquango”, the Infrastructure Planning Commission (IPC).
The organisation will be the sole judge, and one with huge powers. It can grant not just planning permission but also the power to compulsorily seize private property, close roads and footpaths and extinguish Green Belt protection.
Indeed, if a developer is eyeing up your land for some new scheme, the IPC can grant that developer access to it – even allow him to dig “exploratory” holes in it – before planning permission has even been applied for, let alone given.
The IPC aims to decide all applications, however complicated and controversial, in just ten months or less – even new nuclear power stations, of which it expects to do two in its first year.
The presumption, under new Government-set “national policy statements,” will be for development. There will be no rights of appeal to anyone, not even (in most circumstances) the courts. “You will not be able to judicially review our decisions, only our failure to follow our own processes,” says Sir Michael Pitt, the commission’s new chairman, in an interview with The Sunday Telegraph.
The urbane figure of Sir Michael will be the IPC’s public face. Does he realise he could soon be the most unpopular man in Britain? Is he looking forward to the climate campers occupying his reception area? “I think all the commissioners understand what they’re taking on,” he says, smiling.
Sir Michael says that the old way – where controversial schemes were typically considered first by a judge or planning inspector at a public inquiry, with the final decision in the hands of a minister – took far too long, rewarded “timewasting” and worked against the national interest. Many would, for instance, agree that Britain needs new power stations – but the planning process for the nuclear plant at Sizewell B, in Suffolk, famously lasted five years.
The new regime, Pitt insists, will actually give people “better engagement” as well as being quicker. Developers will have to prove they have consulted the community before the IPC even accepts their application.
The process may be brief but it will be open, unlike ministerial decision making. There will still be public hearings – although much shorter ones, with the IPC having the power to block any point they deem “irrelevant” or which has already been made “in any form or by any other person.”
Nor will you be allowed to object to the idea that Britain should have, for instance, more wind farms or bigger airports – only to the particular circumstances of the one proposed.
How often will the IPC actually reject any application? “Those that can get their way through the pre-application [consultation] process are going to be the strongest cases,” says Sir Michael. So not very often, then? “I would not rule out the possibility of us turning down a number of applications.”
Back in Brechfa, the locals are deeply cynical about the IPC’s promise of engagement. “This has been set up to push small people like us out of the way,” says Caroline Evans. “The wind farms have started their consultation exercise – but they’re not consulting us, they’re telling us. It’s dictation, not consultation.”
Victoria Wadham says: “We didn’t choose the IPC. They’re chosen to get the result the Government wants and shift the blame. We can’t sack them. It’s not democratic. Democracy is supposed to work from the bottom up.”
And across the nation as a whole, countryside groups say the Government, and the IPC, are tilting at windmills – or rather wind farms. “The case for the planning system causing inordinate delays has been hugely overstated on the basis of two or three extreme cases,” says Neil Sinden, policy director of the Campaign to Protect Rural England.
Government figures show that the average major project currently takes two years to get through planning. But even with the IPC, the new compulsory pre-application process means it is unlikely to take less than fifteen months – a saving of only nine months.
Others say that the definition of “nationally necessary” projects has been drawn too widely. Some power stations may indeed be needed. But is airport expansion genuinely imperative for Britain’s future? How does that sit with the Government’s declared objective to cut C02?
And, for all Sir Michael’s belief that IPC knows what it’s taking on, its resources do not seem up to the huge scale of its task. The IPC will decide around 45 major projects each year – many both complex and controversial. It will cover the whole of England and Wales. But it will do so with just 110 staff, including all the commissioners themselves, some of them part-time. That is about the same number as work for the planning departments of two or three medium-sized London boroughs.
“They are going to face huge, if not insurmountable, challenges in delivering on their promises,” says Mr Sinden. The fear is that in order to keep within their timescale, the IPC will cut corners and skimp on scrutiny. Sir Michael says that he will increase staffing and call on specialist expertise if necessary.
But perhaps the most telling objection to the new order comes from the Suffolk MP and former environment secretary, John Gummer, whose constituency includes Sizewell C, one of the two new nuclear power projects the IPC will decide upon.
“The inquiry into the previous power station, Sizewell B, did take a long time but by the end my constituents were in favour because they felt their views had been heard,” says Mr Gummer. “But if people feel they’re not being listened to, they will not put up with it. There will be so much anger that it will actually take longer, politicians will have to intervene anyway or Swampy will rule.”
The Government sees Britain’s planning system as a problem, a blockage on development – a view that also informs its separate, if equally controversial, proposals to downgrade the protection of heritage buildings.
But nothing arouses more passion in Middle England than planning, conservation and the countryside. Could ministers have given us the next poll tax?