Imagining a sustainable city workshop at City Retreat

We spent another lovely Saturday afternoon at City Retreat, hosting a workshop entitled 'Imagining a sustainable city'. This was funded by ArtReach, as part of their Liberty UK festival. We explained to workshop participants how we had re-written Leicester City Council's local plan in 2020, to present our vision of how the city could respond to climate change. We talked about renewable energy, energy efficiency, active transport, food growing and space for wildlife. Then everyone had a go at imagining a sustainable city! Some wonderful ideas came out of these conversations and we hope that everyone went hope with an inspiring vision of what a sustainable future could look like.

Launch of the Alternative Local Plan

We have spent months during lockdown re-writing the City Council’s Local Plan, after we discovered that the draft was missing many key policies needed to address climate change. Leicester City Council declared a climate emergency in February 2019 but in spite of this, the draft Local Plan that they published in March this year contains little detail on reducing Leicester’s carbon footprint. The Local Plan is the most important planning policy document for the city and will affect all planning decisions for the next 16 years. 

Members of Leicester Friends of the Earth and Climate Action Leicester and Leicestershire were dismayed to find so much missing from the City Council’s draft Local Plan and decided to take action. Four of us took a course in planning policy run by national Friends of the Earth (conducted over Zoom) to learn more about how planning works. We then worked with other local campaigners and set ourselves a timetable to read one or two chapters of the draft Local Plan each fortnight, discuss them in Zoom meetings and then write our own versions, with a strong emphasis on sustainability. We began in May and finished editing our Alternative Local Plan seven months later, in November. We will be submitting the full document, which stands at 63 pages, as our response to the City Council’s consultation and you can download it here. 

People tend to dismiss planning as boring but actually it is an incredibly important part of responding to climate change. How and where we build has enormous implications for energy use and biodiversity. Re-writing the Local Plan has been a massive project but we wanted to show the City Council what a really sustainable Local Plan could look like. It needs to include policies to improve energy efficiency of buildings, increase renewable energy generation, make it easier to walk, cycle and take the bus, protect green spaces and create more habitat for wildlife within the city. 

We hope that the City Council will be able to take inspiration from our version of the Local Plan.

To mark the launch of their Local Plan and to demonstrate that we are asking the City Council to make Leicester a model of sustainability, we created a cardboard model of a sustainable Leicester. A few of us worked on the models and then we collected them together for a photo. The model Leicester includes houses, flats, shops and public buildings with solar panels on their roofs. There are also green spaces, street trees and community gardens.

Climate Action Leicester and Leicestershire are encouraging as many people as possible to submit their own response to the consultation. They have prepared 12 key points that people might want to mention; these are published on their website along with a 40-minute talk that anyone can watch and even a song about the Local Plan! If you haven't responded to the consultation yet, please do so before the deadline - 7th December.

Planning for Leicester's Future

If you follow this blog, you could be forgiven for thinking that Leicester Friends of the Earth has been taking a break during lockdown. In fact, we’ve been busier than ever but it just hasn’t been very newsworthy.

Leicester City Council published their draft local plan in March and we have spent the last few months reading it carefully, discussing each chapter in Zoom meetings, learning more about the planning system, looking at local plans prepared by other local authorities and deciding what an ideal local plan for Leicester would look like. We’re working with Climate Action Leicester and Leicestershire on this project. The consultation has been delayed but we’re now expecting it to re-open in September and we’ll let you know more about our response then.

All local authorities which make decisions about planning have to develop a local plan. This document is then used to decide whether planning applications are approved or rejected. It sets out the council’s expectations and requirements and covers everything from where development should take place and the density of housing to energy efficiency standards, the amount of parking provided for office blocks and the amount of green space needed for a given size of population. The local plan decides what our city will look like in the future. When we are facing a climate emergency, it is incredibly important that local plans take this into account and set high standards for making our towns and cities sustainable, healthy places to live.

The process for local authorities to create a local plan is long. It starts with detailed analysis of the area and what is needed (e.g., the type of housing, the level of flood risk, the requirement for employment land) and then works through several rounds of consultation. People who live in or near to the area can review the council’s drafts and have a say. Friends of the Earth groups and other campaigning organisations put an enormous amount of time into responding to local plan consultations and often manage to persuade their council to strengthen the environmental credentials of the final version. This is as it should be; democracy doesn’t begin and end at election time.

But now the government wants to change all of that. On 6^th August, they published their ‘Planning for the Future’ White Paper setting out proposed reforms to the planning system. And it is clear that they envision a future in which we have no say about our local area at all. The Guardian, the Town and Country Planning Association, Rights Community Action and even the Financial Times have all published articles explaining what is wrong with the government’s proposals. (And I urge you to read these articles if you haven’t already – everyone who cares about the future needs to understand what is happening.) To summarise: the government wants to move to a zonal planning system, where our local plan would be reduced to a colour-coded map and all of the detail prepared by those who know the area and have a stake in its future would simply be removed. Planning applications would not even be needed apart from in exceptional circumstances, so we wouldn’t be able to object to individual developments. We might be able to have a say about the design code, but the government is also preparing a national version so our control over our local area would be minimal.

We cannot accept this. Our planning system needs reform but we want more democracy, not less. Those who live in an area should have a say about its future. There is a campaign gathering steam to object to the government’s proposals. Some of the people involved have written their own proposals for what needs to change and called it The People’s Charter for Democracy in Planning. The articles of this Charter are as follows:

1. The right to participate.
2. Local decisions should be made locally by democratically accountable bodies
3. A meaningful legal duty to secure sustainable development, tackling climate change, and the health and well-being of all citizens.

We think this offers a much better vision of the future of planning. We will let you know how you can get involved in supporting this Charter.

In the meantime, if you want to object to the government’s proposals, national Friends of the Earth has written a model response to the consultation that you can use and adapt. Please get involved and do whatever you can to prevent this attack on our rights.