ChrisButch wrote: ↑11 Feb 2022, 1:02pm
Bmblbzzz wrote: ↑10 Feb 2022, 9:23pm
Well, we now have Chris Boardman in charge of an Office for Active Travel (or similar title), which is a good beginning. But what's its budget? What powers does it have? How many planning applications, if any, can it scrutinise? From what I've heard its powers are mostly negative – to reject and censure substandard schemes, and remove funding from the responsible authorities – not to promote and build suitable schemes.
Just on the 'how many planning applications' question - the announcement so far is that it will be a statutory consultee on all major planning applications. Well, a major application is one which includes 10 or more houses or covers an area of greater than 0.5 hectares. Apparently about 5000 a year of these are granted in England. ATE will have a staff of 100. So if every one of these had this function within his/her brief, they would each would have to deal with about one a week. Actually more than this, since I can't find a figure for the percentage of major applications rejected - though the overall percentage is quite low, about 18%.
For comparison, our cycling campaign has 2 volunteers doing about one evening a week checking planning applications for 5 districts/boroughs. We manage to object to most of the major ones that merit it (most of them, sadly!) and usually spot the ordinary ones that seriously impact main cycle routes. We rarely comment on ones that are OK or good unless they are exceptional or we believe it may encourage repeat developers to consult us earlier in future.
I think there are 309 planning authorities in England (181 districts and 128 unitaries), plus they will be sent the major applications instead of hunting through each district's website, so I think Active Travel England should be able to do basic review-and-comment of the planning load with about 20 staff. Any more staff on the planning side should enable more work educating planning authority officers and defending Active Travel objections robustly at appeals and inquiries.
What usually defeats our objections is an irrational and illogical failure by the highway authorities and planning authorities to actually object to developments that contravene their good-looking Plans, Frameworks, Strategies and Standards! They should be more willing to uphold objections from a national government agency, like how they usually uphold any from National Highways.
For example of how wishy-washy highway and planning authorities are now, we even had a developer actually proudly boast in their Access Statement that they were exceeding the maximum permitted car parking set out in the relevant supposedly-legally-binding Strategies and Standards, creating a layout that looked like a tarmac wasteland with a few houses dotted about, and still the officers would not object. Fortunately, in that case, the excessive car parking had indirectly caused a playground to be placed next to an unfenced balancing lake and someone else's "why do they want children to drown?" objection was upheld and the development refused.
I think I read that the Active Travel England base budget will be £2bn until the intended end of this Parliament (2024?). It sounds a lot but I remember that National Highways budget is £4.5bn per year.