After a frosty encounter at the same event last year, there was a thawing of relations between Bristol City Council’s cabinet member for spatial planning and city design Nicola Beech and Generator South West’s managing director Paul Isaacs at EG’s latest Question Time in Bristol.
Nearly eight months on since the two hotly debated the influence of politics on planning decisions, which resulted in Beech telling Isaacs to embark on a different career if he didn’t like the way things were, Isaacs told the audience that although “it’s never rosy from a developer’s perspective” a better working relationship between the senior members of Bristol City council and developers in the area was being established.
Listen to the podcast from the Question Time below [please note this was filmed on location so be aware of background noise]:
Isaacs added that, shortly after the previous debate, he got in touch with Beech and the two went for a coffee to continue to discuss and work through their differences.
Is politics moving forward?
However, he admitted that he would still like to remove politics from the planning process.
“It’s where you draw the line about politics. There’s two tiers of politics. There’s the politics that Nicola, Marvin [Rees, Bristol’s mayor] and Paul [Smith, Bristol’s cabinet member for housing] are involved with, which is a strategic plan.
“It’s a vision, it’s thought out, it’s well presented and it’s clear where they want to go. I have no doubts about that and from that point of view that’s encouraging to me.
“[But] the decisions aren’t made by them unfortunately. It’s made by the planning committee who sometimes don’t share that [vision]. They’re methods of decision making are very different.
“They’re concerned about being re-elected and their experience and knowledge of the issues that they’re actually voting on is limited, through no fault of their own, it’s just they’ve been chosen to be committee members on a subject that’s not their area of expertise and it’s a complicated area and getting more complicated by the day.
“So politics is still a barrier, but there is, certainly in Bristol, leadership that is trying to take that forward.”
Beech, insisting that she did not want to get into another argument with the developer, contested that “actually there are some incredibly talented councillors on that committee”.
Defending the planning committee, she added: “They’re not on the committee to agree with you, per se, and I think that we’ve done a lot of work on the committee generally.
“[With] our officers we go through with the members on a quarterly basis to see if there are any trends, are there any things that are appearing, are there any things we should be concerned about, because, obviously, it’s really important that the statutory process is upheld and is accurate and reflects, sort of, the application that is in front of them.
“This idea that it’s like the wild west I just want to counter that … but the coffee was great.”
Barriers to development
The council is looking at streamlining its planning system and has now introduced a system to deal with schemes that have stalled and to help unblock them, she added.
One big barrier, however, is infrastructure and Julian Harbottle, director and regional business head for Savills, conceded Bristol was “notorious for being an impossible place to get around” and that he didn’t think the new Metrobus or the delayed programme to electrify the railway would make a huge of a difference to this.
“But the more we can make it easier to get around, whether that is by additional public transport or additional cycle lanes that has got to be a good thing.”
Meanwhile, for Ross Polkinghorne, partner at law firm Burges Salmon, connectivity to Bristol Airport is a piece of infrastructure of paramount importance.
“It’s been statistically proven by endless studies that if you can increase passenger numbers you increase GDP … Something like that is pretty fundamental if Bristol wants to compete on the world’s stage,” he added.
Linda Taylor, managing director at Copper Consultancy, said that “Bristol needs to be ambitious and make sure its pushing ahead with digital advancements, unlocking the land that’s needed and making sure the infrastructure is there to ensure connectivity to enable continued growth, going forward”.
Lessons from Grenfell
The tragedy at Grenfell tower in the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea last June forced Bristol City Council to reconsider its tall buildings policy, its cabinet member for spatial planning and city design Nicola Beech admitted.
She said: “We had the conversation about the SPD last September. Do we go with it? Do we not go with it? Is it the right time to be talking about tall buildings post Grenfell and Marvin [Bristol’s mayor Marvin Lees] and I were in agreement that we needed to show city leadership.
“We don’t want to shy from it.
“Those tall building applications are coming in. People are proposing to build height in our city and to not put out safety guidance and to not put quality standards down just isn’t the right thing to do at all…so we went forward with it in light of that tragedy.
“There’s an inevitability that the city is going to rise. Whether or not we entirely agree with some of the proposals we receive is another matter, but the locational guidance we’ve provided actually gives people a degree of certainty.”
The council, which has now approved some sky-breaking for tall buildings for Bristol, is also planning to lift the green belt designation on the small amount it has, but Beech said it doesn’t mean it’s all going to be built on.
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