Nicholas Boys Smith is the founder and chairman of Create Streets
This month Britain has elected 5,000 local councillors, six mayors, 129 Scottish MSPs and 96 Members of the Welsh Senedd. (And, yes, that number has expanded since you last looked. Politicians multiply if you don’t keep them under control). There are thousands of newly elected councillors and a rainbow of new local administrations. In a five-horse national race it was impossible to predict precisely what would happen but, as guessed, there are fewer red councils and more blue ones of various hues.
Meanwhile, the British state, up and down, north and south, lumbers on with declining capacity and productivity, so lost in posturing and process complexity that it no longer seems capable of achieving reasonable results with reasonable budgets on a reasonable timeframe. It’s easy to despair. What can a newly elected councillor or administration actually do? How do we reverse the catastrophic atrophying of state capacity of the last generation? Particularly when, in my experience, some local officials ‘take advantage’ of new administrations, particularly in ‘difficult’ areas such as planning and regeneration. (‘Well of course you could do that, councillor, but our legal experience says …’ etc.)
How can new councillors and councils improve prosperity and productivity, health and happiness in their little slice of Britain? Here’s the good news. Despite everything, you can.
Over the last decade, Create Streets has worked with dozens of councils from Scotland to Somerset. We have worked with experienced administrations and new ones, effective administrations and ineffective ones, energetic administrations and slothful ones. We’ve written local planning, highways and design policy and supported the regenerative development of individual places. We’ve seen councillors get it right. We’ve seen councillors muck it up. We’ve seen councillors lead and be led. What would I advise? What ideas and policy ‘hooks’ slice through the morass? Here are my top five tips to improve high streets and town centres, encourage local prosperity and support housebuilding which is beautiful and popular. Some are ‘big picture’. Some may seem ‘small picture.’ But all, I believe, speak to the actual role that local councils cannot escape: acting as stewards for their little slice of Britain, loving it, caring about it, managing the public spaces and highways which are their inevitable responsibility not as joyless jobsworths but as dutiful citizens, with civic pride not with careless disdain.
Firstly, cure street scars. We’ve all seen street scars: the freshly laid paving on a high street or town centre: within months, weeks or, sometimes days, a slice or a square is pulled up thoughtlessly, cracked, smashed and replaced by a scar of tarmac, a scar which lingers for months or years or forever and which seems to mock any local or neighbourhood desire to live in a place with self-worth. We know people care. When we tweet about street scars, it often goes viral and the BBC has covered this aspect of our work more than anything else. Street scars are normally due to utility firms not repairing the road properly. An error in the New Roads and Street Works Act 1991 gives utility firms a needlessly long six months to effect repairs and risibly low £2,500 maximum fines if they don’t. It is failing and should be changed nationally as we’ve set out. However, even before it is, councils can still improve matters. Firstly, relentlessly name, shame and fine errant utility firms. RBKC’s roadworks enforcement teams does this well. Secondly, ensure local highways policy only has a limited and hard-wearing palette of simpler, more natural materials. Surrey County Council’s materials guidance is a good example.
Secondly, love your local centres by repopulating them. Support local developers by making it easy to create beautiful town centre homes. Town or village centre living is crucial to thriving places. Encourage urban ‘Gentle Density’ of terraced houses or mansion blocks. Don’t worry about what buildings are used for. Let buildings evolve between homes, pubs, offices and shops as the market and chance demands. Don’t micromanage. Use the new Class E Use Class and Permitted Development as much as possible. De-risk and encourage new homes on existing streets with local consent. Use underused legal tools, such as design-coded Supplementary Plans, Local Development Orders and Simplified Planning Zones, to pre-permit new locally terraced homes on rediscovered lost streets, on town centre sites or on under-used surface town centre car parks (there are often more than you think). Also pre-approve development of houses and flats above shops subject to a popular, beautiful pattern book that permits the intensification of some existing streets. It’s easy and cheap these days to work out what people like and the planning tools are sitting there under-used. This also helps smaller and local developers by de-risking smaller sites. There are interesting examples in Cornwall, Lichfield and London. There’s also a thrilling new scheme in Newbury.
Thirdly, beautify your village and town centre streets and squares. Invest public funds in core town centre streets. Don’t’ ban cars but design them so that humans are the primary species. This will help local high streets. Back shopfront repair and improvement. Good shopfronts make streets look cared for, strengthen local identity and help independent businesses trade better. Adopt a clear shopfront design guide, offer modest match-funding or grants for repairs and reinstatement, and make it easier for owners to replace bad signage, poor materials and dead frontages with something simpler, more traditional and better detailed. Small physical changes, better fascias, timber joinery, repaired cornices and decent colours, can transform a high street far faster than most grand regeneration plans. There are more and more examples for example in Lichfield, Brentwood or the Isle of Wight.
Fourth, re-create trams to increase urban productivity and what economists term ‘agglomeration effects’, the shared pool of skilled labour, specialist suppliers, finance, tools, know-how and tacit knowledge which drives innovation and growth. A perfect storm of over-centralisation, regulation and letting the gold-plating means that it’s two to three times as expensive per mile to lay trams in Britain as in Europe or the US, as our research with Britain Remade shows. However recently, working with the University of Warwick, the City of Coventry has found a workaround. Urban councils should copy it. That means using their modular system with shallow track, fewer utility diversions, lighter vehicles and quicker installation, rather than accepting today’s gold-plated norms as inevitable. Coventry’s new Very Light Rail was laid in just over eight weeks, with a target cost of about £24m per mile not double or triple that.
Finally, green up. If you want more prosperous places and happier residents, the evidence is unambiguous. Planting street trees is good for people and places. Think of them as a practical priority, not a decorative afterthought. Start where canopy cover is lowest and footfall is highest. Work with highways, public health and flood teams together, because trees do several jobs at once: they cool streets, slow traffic, lift mental wellbeing, reduce flooding and support prosperous high streets. This is a good use of modest public funds. Better still change your highways policy and empower local citizens and shops with the right to ‘re-green’ in certain places as a default. Our Greening Up report shows how.
These policies are no panaceas for Britain’s mess. But collectively they would really help. There is no economic, political or legal reason why councils that wish to do so cannot get going. For all our sakes, I hope they get cracking.