Planning White Paper Consultation Feedback

This email is coming from Caversham and District Residents Association (CADRA) which is a large, active and well respected residents' association in Reading. It has close ties with other community groups in the area and the local council. It is strictly non-political.

We have some comments on the Planning for a Sustainable Future White Paper:

• We are concerned about how the new policies and systems will be established and integrated with existing strategies and policies of existing organisations and departments (eg. The South East Plan, the government departments for airports, power, roads etc.
• We are concerned about how local groups, individuals and the local councillors will be represented in establishing the policies. We suggest wide individual and respresentitive (MPs and local councillors) participation through a series of questionaires, forums etc to really gather input on what the country really does want in terms of airports, power plants, roads etcetc.
• We are concerned about how independent the Independent Commission will be. Who will appoint them? What will be their knowledge and skills base? How will one group of people have the breadth of knowledge and capability to make decisions on everything from new ports to waste disposal? How will they be able to establish and understand the impact to all aspects of the environment, local and nationwide, even global. We understand that there will be experts brought in but it is the commission who will make the decision.
  We are concerned that major infrastructure projects will get bogged down through this bottleneck of one independent commission.
• We are concerned that the independent commission appears to have no elected respresentitives on it. We would like to suggest that for each major infra-structure project, a Project Commission is established which encompasses some of the independent commission who understand the policies, some appropriate technical experts, some nationally elected representitives (ie MPs from both the affetced area and from elsewhere) and some locally elected respresentitives (ie local councillors) of the area(s) affected. The group as a whole is then responsible for making the decision through discusion, agreements and compromise. Having local participation in the decision making is essential for engendering buy-in and ultimately a perceived successful outcome.
• We are concerned about the process for local people to get their voice heard. The open forums for this to happen should allow anyone who wants to speak to be able to do so and their comments should be proven to be taken into account either by adopting them or by an explanation of why they could not be. Both the submission of and response to comments can be made easy by allowing comments via website and other technology enabled means.
• There must be some way of ensuring that not only do developers have to consult with local people but that they have to prove that they have taken their ideas and concerns into account or explain why they are not possible. Regularly developers say that they have consulted with this group or that and this implies that the groups are now happy with the plans. This is usually not the case. They may consult but there is no record of what they agreed to (and changed their plans accordingly) and what they did not, and why. There should be some accountability for this.

We hope you take our comments into account and look forward to see them reflected in the future implementation.

CADRA Committee
www.cadra.org.uk