Why city region’s masterplan has gone missing...
OF all the many complex policy challenges the region’s leaders have on their to-do list, this one is probably the least-loved, from politicians to civil servants and a lot of the public. Even, some might say, certain journalists.
The Greater Manchester Spatial Framework is as complicated, contentious and enormous as it is important.
If you’re reading this, you probably already know what it is. But a recap might still be useful.
Going back to 2014, when the region was negotiating its original devolution deal with George Osborne, the GMSF was considered by many senior figures involved to be one of the most important wins.
This overarching masterplan, they believed, would allow them to define collectively how the area would develop in the next couple of decades, allocating where major housing and industrial expansion would take place across the entire conurbation. Instead of that direction being dictated by Whitehall, this was an opportunity to show that politically difficult decisions really can be taken at local level, particularly when they mean a complicated series of trade-offs and even when they mean reducing your green belt.
Fast-forward six months and it was out there. Uproar ensued. This was by far the biggest response to any Greater Manchester public consultation and much of it was negative - with the most vocal concerns focused on plans to nibble away at the green belt.
As the mayoral election loomed, Andy Burnham’s campaign announced it would be rewritten should he win. There would be no net loss of green belt, he promised.
But as we head into the 2020 mayoral election three years later, the spatial framework has now been missing in action for some time.
The last point any noise was made about it was at the start of 2019, when the redrafted version of the original was launched at a press conference in central Manchester. Housing numbers had been moved around to see the city centre and central Salford - both of which have plenty of brownfield land council bosses are keen to develop - soak up some of those in outlying boroughs going through green belt arguments, such as Stockport.
This document was part of a ‘radical’ strategy, it was announced, a ‘bold and farreaching’ move. At the time, Westminster was ‘paralysed by Brexit’ but by contrast, Greater Manchester was ‘taking the initiative.’
It didn’t meet the ‘no net loss’ pledge, but it did cut the amount of planned green belt development in half.
Over a year later, the rewritten plan has been out to consultation and come back in again, but nothing has materialised in public since.
One official reason for the latest of many delays is that Greater Manchester is still waiting for government to pass a specific bit of legislation, the need for which had been overlooked up until last year. And certainly there has been a blockage at government level: ministers have still not, a year or so after it was raised with them, agreed to the move.
From the perspective of the mayor’s office, ministers have further trapped Greater Manchester in its current stasis. While the latest population projections released in 2018 suggested the region didn’t need to plan for as many homes as originally expected, government - which is wedded to a target of 300,000 new homes a year - ordered local leaders to stick with the original, higher numbers.
This is the crux of Andy Burnham’s argument: you’re telling us to build too much.
“Government says go higher still with our housing targets, even though we already think we’re above what we need,” says a source close to the mayor, who points out that any government funding for the cleaning-up of brownfield sites is contingent on aiming for those higher numbers.
“But government is also telling us to consult properly on the green belt. So it’s a vicious circle. We want to develop brownfield - so give us the money and then we don’t have to do as much on the green belt. We can’t just stick an extra couple of storeys on the Beetham Tower.”
This stasis has persisted and looks set to persist past the local and mayoral elections, a situation most insiders admit is no coincidence. Alongside the mayoral vote, the districts with the most controversial sites Bury and Stockport - are Labour-controlled and politically on a knife-edge ahead of the upcoming local elections, which also take place on May 7. Meanwhile Bury has also just seen two new Tory MPs elected, one of whom in particular, James Daly, has been vocal about his opposition to Bury’s plans for thousands of homes on green belt.
“These MPs took a stance on housing development,” points out one senior official of the latest delay.
“It’s not just the politics of Burnham, but being able to deliver it, because you need MP support really as well.”
As a result, multiple sources report that ‘tweaks’ are currently being undertaken, particularly in Bury.
Plans for major development around Simister, near the border with Manchester, are now quietly being scaled back. There are also moves to ensure proposals for a huge expansion of housing in the green belt around Elton do not come forward until funding for new infrastructure - including a tram stop are rock-solid.
It’s understood the 50pc reduction in green belt development could rise to 60pc or 65pc, with Wigan, Stockport and Oldham all also looking to tweak their plans.
So somewhere within the bowels of various town halls, and mayoral headquarters at Churchgate House, weary officials are, even now, redrawing boundaries on maps. Those maps are not expected to materialise until July. In the meantime, however, that has left some authorities in a difficult position. Several have seen their own local plans - the borough-level planning documents that are meant to fit into the GMSF - expire while waiting for it to appear. Any borough without one is left vulnerable to their planning decisions being challenged by developers, leading to a dreaded ‘planning by appeal’ scenario.
Those boroughs include Salford, Bury and Trafford. Manchester’s local plan is running out too. The city recently decided to get on with it and went out to consultation on its new version, not prepared to wait for the GMSF and keen to stop developers taking advantage of the lack of a framework by simply gambling on winning through appeal.
“If you’ve got neither the GMSF nor a local plan, that’s when you get speculative development,” points out one official.
Salford has an up-to-date policy document in place, covering issues such as affordability, but not anything mapping out where major developments will go. The city has been waiting for the GMSF to materialise, but eventually it will also need a full local plan if it doesn’t. Meanwhile regardless of the delay, if Bury - or Stockport - changes hands or falls into no overall control in May, that potentially makes it even harder to get a plan over the line afterwards.
“It isn’t guaranteed that it’s going to happen, because of the political situation,” says one council source of the overall framework.
But they believe it would be those places currently arguing about green belt that would be most adversely affected by that, since at present Manchester and Salford are absorbing some of their numbers under the current framework. If that disappeared, they would no long be able to share those housing targets.
“It would be catastrophic for those places,” points out one council figure elsewhere. “In the long run those places will end up with stuff on the green belt anyway.”
Many insiders believe the political window for passing the framework lies in between this May’s elections and expected all-out elections in 2022, assuming it can get through town halls in various states of control.
But increasingly, says one planning consultant, developers are thinking the GMSF won’t happen at all.
“They’ve been working for quite a while on the basis that it won’t be coming forward and it’s not worth thinking about,” they say.
“Developers normally want certainty. But it’s been knocking around for that long that I think they’ve just given up waiting.”
Increasingly, says one planning consultant, developers are thinking the GMSF won’t happen at all