Planning sustainable communities

When I first started my career as an amateur neighbourhood planner, I was confused about the use of the word ‘sustainability’ in our local plan. I live in village of about a thousand people in South Worcestershire. The local plan (called the ‘South Worcestershire Development Plan’) covers half the county and has a lot to say about sustainability. But it mysteriously attaches this term to its proposals to concentrate all new rural housing in what it terms ‘Category 1 villages’. These are larger villages which, like my own, have a shop and post office, a pub, and a village school. Category 1 villages come at the top of a hierarchy of rural settlements of decreasing size, with definitions of each successive category (2 to 4) included in the local plan.

Discussions of sustainable development usually begin by quoting the  UN report Our Common Future, which defines it as ‘development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’. Since the population is growing, a key part of meeting future needs must include  feeding these extra mouths. How then could it be ‘sustainable’ to build large housing estates next to villages on fields which until then had been producing good crops of brassicas, potatoes and other vegetables? I discovered that developments of this kind were deemed ‘sustainable’ by the local plan because this supposedly reduced transport use compared with building on agricultural land in smaller villages. This idea of ‘transport sustainability’ seems to have originated from the 1990s, and appears in many local plans together with the related idea that there is a hierarchy of rural settlements.

I have never found any evidence to justify this idea of ‘transport sustainability’. It is instead probable that transport use is much the same in large and small villages: in both, almost all people commute to work by car, buy their groceries from urban supermarkets or on-line, and drive their children to school. But ‘transport sustainability’ is useful for developers because it provides a rationalisation for building high-priced housing estates of ‘luxury executive homes’ in larger villages within commuting range of cities. Needless to say, this policy is disliked by people who see their pleasant village turning into a suburban sprawl. But the policy is unpopular in many smaller villages too. This was confirmed for me when I went to a conference on neighbourhood planning. I found that half the attenders were from large villages that wished to prevent large housing estates being built, while the other half were from small villages that wanted more houses but were obstructed in this aim by their local plan. The people from small villages were concerned that without a small amount of new housing, they would be left with a declining and elderly population with minimum access to services. But all attenders at the conference agreed that what their communities needed was housing that met the specific needs of their community, particularly social rented or affordable houses to enable younger members of families to stay near their parents, and small manageable houses so that elderly people could move to smaller and more manageable houses within their own community.

Elderly and infirm people in rural areas are particularly vulnerable to another challenge: the decline of local services in villages, both large and small. The Rural Coalition has estimated that about a thousand village pubs and shops close each year in England. Even where shops remain, reductions in the remuneration of sub-postmasters is causing a decline in village postal services. Meanwhile, the Royal College of General Practitioners has predicted that many small (and therefore rural) GP practices will close because of changes in the NHS remuneration formula. In my own Category 1 village, a pub has recently closed, while the larger village up the road now lacks a shop and a post office. In other words, Category 1 villages are increasingly resembling category 2,3 and 4 villages.

This decline in services will have its greatest impact on the 10% of the rural population who lack their own transport - a group dominated by the very elderly. In the next 20 years, the ONS estimates that the number of people over the age of 80 in my part of Worcestershire will double. A high proportion of these will live alone and need support. It is unlikely that social care funding will rise to take account of this change. The burden of care will therefore, as now, fall on families and increasingly on local communities. This means that a major objective of neighbourhood planning must be to maintain social and family networks. New housebuilding in villages should therefore be of two kinds: smaller manageable houses so that very elderly people can downsize and remain within the communities where they have their friends and where they are known; and social rented housing so that the majority of young families who can not afford to buy a house can stay in their community close to their parents.

Another objective should be to maintain and expand voluntary support. Of course, many services operated by volunteers exist already in rural areas. In my area, several villages co-operate in running a day centre for the elderly, which draws attenders from 25 villages, brought to the centre by a large team of volunteer drivers. Many villages also have clubs and coffee-mornings which provide social links for very elderly people. But there are great variations between villages in the availability of volunteers and the organisational skills to develop their own local services. The people who contribute most to local organisations are generally those who identify strongly with their community and have a sense of mutual obligation to each other. This in turn seems to arise from the sense that they live in a special and unique place. This sense of place is undermined when villages are expanded with identikit housing estates, which make everywhere look alike. Where this happens, the mutual support characteristic of English villages gradually declines to the level found in our more impersonal suburbs.

So a major aim of planning in future should be create and maintain sustainable communities rather than ‘sustainable transport’. This would involve looking at each village not as a depository for luxury executive homes built to meet centrally-determined housing targets, but as a place in its own right, with its own need for particular kinds of housing. In many villages, this would probably include housing to enable families to live in proximity to provide support to each other, and housing to let elderly people move to more manageable dwellings within their own community.  

Valediction for my mother

My mother died on 4th February 2018. This is the valediction speech I gave at her funeral.

"How is it possible to summarise in just a few minutes a life of 98 years and what it means?

My mother was born in 1919 in a house long-since demolished, just across the road from this Church. She went to the St James’ primary school a few yards away, and spent the rest of her life in Shirley. She remembered that when she was a child,  Shirley was an attractive village surrounded by woods and meadows full of wild flowers. Water came from a well, and you lit a candle to go to your bedroom at night.

Mom was one of five children, in a family that became increasingly impoverished after the prolonged illness and death of her father when she was still a child. I once asked her for her father’s Christian name, and she said ‘Daddy’, as a child would. The family was held together by her formidable mother, who somehow fed and clothed her children on a widow’s pension of ten shillings a week. Like all her brothers and sisters, Mom left school at 14 to contribute to the family’s income.

At some point in her teenage years, Mom started ‘courting’ (as they said in those days) my father. Unfortunately, marriage was opposed by her mother on the surprising grounds that my father was too short. My mother therefore had to wait until she was 21 to be able to marry without parental consent. The marriage took place in Solihull Registry Office in December 1940, and was immediately followed by the sound of air raid sirens. So my parents first night of marital bliss was spent in an air-raid shelter.

Marriage was followed by wartime factory work, with my mother working on day shifts and my father on nights. This may be one reason why the birth of my brother and me was delayed until after the war. My parents had a happy marriage, in which they seem to have done almost everything together. Mom and Dad were united by their commitment to politics, to cricket, to gardening and to the education of their children. They saw education as the road to a better life for their sons, but also as something worth having for its own sake. Both were essentially self-educated and loved reading.

My mother had a deep love not just for her own husband, children and grandchildren, but also a strong affection for her many nieces and nephews. She enjoyed attending their weddings and celebrations, which she saw as an opportunity to get what she called a ‘new outfit’. She had a love of cooking, which was somewhat handicapped by my father’s refusal to eat any meat other than sausages or indeed any food other than sausages and two veg followed by pudding and custard. My mother provided loving nursing care for my father when he was severely ill towards the end of his life.

My mother was a person of great honesty, to the extent of sometimes being outspoken, and she had enormous optimism, including about her own ability as a driver. This was curtailed somewhat when she drove from a standing start into a shopfront. Fortunately, no-one was hurt and the shop conveniently turned out to be an insurance broker.

She had enormous energy and a love of life. This was despite a failed operation which left her almost blind in the last few years of her life, and the increasing debility to be expected of someone a few years short of a century. Nevertheless, she continued to live in her own home until May of last year.

But when I think of Mom, I smile. I remember not the frail old woman who died last month, nearly blind and struggling to breathe, but instead think of the young vigorous mother I knew as a child, who played with my brother and me with fun and imagination. My mother taught me, by her example, that raising children is the most important thing you do in your life, and that you do so by stimulating their imagination, promoting their desire to learn, and helping them make their own decisions to become thoughtful, caring and independent adults.

I hope that when you think of my mother, you will smile as well".

NOTE: the photograph was taken in 1989 and shows my mother with her five granchildren.