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What will the new Government mean for Market Towns?

It's very early days in the life of the new coalition Government, but how will its policies affect rural communities including Market Towns?

I've looked at the manifestos of both parties to identify the policies that may have an effect on, or be an opportunity for, our Member Organisations across Somerset. This isn't straightforward as our Members operate across a wide range of policy areas.

Before the election, the Conservative Manifesto said some positive things about the devolution of power and giving rights to neighbourhood groups and how important volunteering was to developing the proposed 'Big Society'.

"We will use the state to help stimulate social action, helping social enterprises to deliver public services and training new community organisers to help achieve our ambition of every adult citizen being a member of an active neighbourhood group. We will direct funding to those groups that strengthen communities in deprived areas..."

Neighbourhood groups

Our reform agenda is designed to empower communities to come together to address local issues. For example, we will enable parents to start new schools, empower communities to take over local amenities such as parks and libraries that are under threat, give neighbourhoods greater control of the planning system, and enable residents to hold the police to account in neighbourhood beat meetings.

These policies will give new powers and rights to neighbourhood groups: the ‘little platoons’ of civil society – and the institutional building blocks of the Big Society.

Our ambition is for every adult in the country to be a member of an active neighbourhood group. We will stimulate the creation and development of neighbourhood groups, which can take action to improve their local area. We will use Cabinet Office budgets to fund the training of independent community organisers to help people establish and run neighbourhood groups, and provide neighbourhood grants to the UK’s poorest areas to ensure they play a leading role in the rebuilding of civic society.

To stimulate social action further, we will:

  • transform the civil service into a ‘civic service’ by making sure that participation in social action is recognised in civil servants’ appraisals;
  • launch an annual Big Society Day to celebrate the work of neighbourhood groups and encourage more people to take part in social action;
  • provide funding from the Big Society Bank to intermediary bodies with a track record of supporting and growing social enterprises;
  • develop a measure of well-being that encapsulates the social value of state action.

The National Lottery

We will restore the National Lottery to its original purpose and, by cutting down on administration costs, make sure more money goes to good causes. The Big Lottery Fund will focus purely on supporting social action through the voluntary and community sector, instead of Ministers’ pet projects as at present.

Sports, heritage and the arts will each see their original allocations of 20 per cent of good cause money restored.

Planning

The planning system is vital for a strong economy, for an attractive and sustainable environment, and for a successful democracy.

A Conservative government will introduce a new ‘open source’ planning system. This will mean that people in each neighbourhood will be able to specify what kind of development they want to see in their area. These neighbourhood plans will be consolidated into a local plan.

We will abolish the entire bureaucratic and undemocratic tier of regional planning, including the Regional Spatial Strategies and building targets.

Developers will have to pay a tariff to the local authority to compensate the community for loss of amenity and costs of additional infrastructure. The tariff will replace the payments and levies on development that have grown up under Labour. A portion of this tariff will be kept by the neighbourhoods in which a given development takes place, providing clear incentives for communities which go for growth.

Significant local projects, like new housing estates, will have to be designed through a collaborative process that has involved the neighbourhood. Immediate neighbours will have a new role – with a faster approvals process for planning applications where neighbours raise no objections.

At the national level, for all forms of development, we will publish and present to Parliament for debate a simple and consolidated national planning framework, which will set out national economic and environmental priorities.

To give communities greater control over planning, we will:

  • abolish the power of planning inspectors to rewrite local plans;
  • amend the ‘Use Classes Order’ so that people can use buildings for any purpose allowed in the local plan;
  • limit appeals against local planning decisions to cases that involve abuse of process or failure to apply the local plan;
  • encourage county councils and unitary authorities to compile infrastructure plans;
  • give local planning authorities and other public authorities a duty to co-operate with one another

The Liberal Democrat Manifesto included;

  • Switch traffic from road to rail by investing in local rail improvements, such as opening closed rail lines and adding extra tracks, paid for by cutting the major roads budget.
  • Protect greenfield land and our built heritage by reducing the cost of repairs. We will equalise VAT on new build and repair on an overall revenue-neutral basis. This will also help to reduce the costs of repairs to historic buildings.
  • Abolish the Infrastructure Planning Commission and return decisionmaking, including housing targets, to local people. We will create a third-party right of appeal in cases where planning decisions go against locally agreed plans.
  • Stop major new housing developments in major flood risk areas.
  • Set targets for ‘zero waste’, aiming to end the use of landfill. That means less packaging, more recycling, and a huge increase in anaerobic digestion to generate energy from food and farm waste.
  • Introduce landscape-scale planning policies with a specific remit to restore water channels, rivers and wetlands and reduce flood risk by properly utilising the natural capacity of the landscape to retain water.
  • Strengthen the Youth Service by making it a statutory service, and encourage local authorities to provide youth services in partnership with young people and the voluntary sector.
  • Introducing ‘easy giving accounts’ at publicly-owned banks to allow people to operate charitable giving accounts alongside their current accounts.
  • Reforming Gift Aid to operate at a single rate of 23 per cent – giving more money to charity while closing down a loophole for higher rate tax payers.
  • Reforming the process of criminal record checking so that volunteers need only one record.
  • Give councils greater powers to regulate bus services according to community needs so that local people get a real say over routes and fares.
  • Include the promotion of safer cycling and pedestrian routes in all local transport plans.

(Note - no bias regards editing, it's just that the LibDem document is easier to cut and paste without any preambles to the actual policy commitments).

Since the Coalition formed, we are now in a new era of compromise and what some commentators are calling 'grown-up politics'.

The Agreement between the two parties that was published yesterday is a summary, and there will be more detail later, but it does include the line;

"The parties will promote the radical devolution of power and greater financial autonomy to local government and community groups. This will include a full review of local government finance."

Obviously the plight of rural communities comes down the list of priorities compared to the national Deficit, but we hope that there are opportunities for community planning groups (Market Town Partnerships and Regeneration Groups) to engage properly in revised and restructured LSP's, be recognised for the community engagement and project delivery work they are doing at grassroots level and be supported more in doing this.

Section 11 includes many policies to promote energy efficiency and the development of renewable energy, which may be an area of opportunity for Market Town groups.

To see the rest of the agreement, click here - Coalition Agreement

Matt Day
Coordinator
SMTF

Created on May 13th 2010

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