Recently in Planning Category

This week David Cameron laid into Regional Development Agencies. The Tories, it now seems, would strip RDAs of their transport and planning powers and might even scrap some of them completely, aiming to unravel Labour's regional agenda "piece by piece'.

Cameron went on to say that "the whole experiment with regional assemblies has been a complete mistake. The halfway house we've now got, where RDAs are being given planning powers, is a disaster too... there's a very strong case, at least in parts of the country, that RDAs should go altogether".

Hang on a minute. Scrapping RDAs could well lead to a recentralisation of policy making and delivery in London. Do the Tories really think that this will help the West Midlands economy?

Rather, this proposal seems to miss the point; a lot of good has actually been done by developing policies at the regional and local level rather than in Whitehall, and in providing strategic oversight regionally.

The library here at Birmingham City University is a model of efficiency nowadays. It emails you on the day that your books are supposed to go back and then lets you renew them online when you realise that you haven't looked at said books since the day you got them out. So it is with The 1952 City of Birmingham Development Plan.

This is as dry a document as you could hope to find. I got it out last November as I was pondering what earlier incarnations of the Birmingham Big City Plan had looked like. Given that the inner ring road is now widely recognised as a mistake, where's the document that outlines why it was needed in the first place. How clearly was the case made for it, how emotive was the language used? But since late last year there seems to have been little public discussion of the new plan as Stef Lewandowski has noted on this site. No wonder I'd let it drift.

But I've done the reading on this now and despite the rather plain, austere layout (this was 1952 after all - at the end of the Age of Austerity) the 1952 plan is by far the more exciting document. In fact it has what the new charter document lacks, it has tangible facts to get stuck into and major post-war problems to deal with. If you like, the new one's all theory where the 1952 plan is all practice.