The General Polycentricity Index for South East England is 0.15. This may appear quite low. But, in comparison with the other seven regions, it is in fact quite high: the lowest value, for the traditionally “monocentric” region of Île-de-France, is as low as 0.02; the highest values, for the traditionally “polycentric” regions of Randstad Holland and Rhine-Ruhr, are only in the range 0.15-0.20. The comment of the Randstad Holland team is relevant here: A value of 1.0 would mean that all FURs in the greater Randstad area are equally well connected to each other in terms of commuter flows and that the entire working population works in a place different from their place of residence. Next to being a polycentric utopia, it would also be a clear recipe for traffic chaos and environmental degradation. Against that background, South East England’s relatively high polycentricity index reflects the fact that it has an exceptionally high number of FURs relative to total area – second only to Randstad Holland – and an accompanying high density of its commuting networks. But this is only another way of saying that – despite the apparent predominance of London - the region is intrinsically quite polycentric. Essentially, especially on the western side, the region contains an exceptionally large number of highly independent FURs, which have high degrees of self- containment but which also interact with each other as well as with the central London core. 7. Planning: 1945-2004 Planning in this vast and complex region has long presented unusual problems, simply because of its huge geographical scale and the resulting relationships between central and local government. Central to understanding these complexities is the basic distinction between the continuously built-up area of Greater London, and the rest of the region. Greater London essentially represents the area that was developed before World War Two, within a radius of about 25 km from the centre, after which further contiguous development was essentially stopped by the Green Belt established as a result of the recommendations of Professor Patrick Abercrombie’s 1944 Greater London Plan, but subsequently extended to cover a large area roughly between 25 and 50 kilometres from central London. Since 1965 it has also had its own local government system, consisting of the ancient City of London plus 32 London Boroughs, plus a strategic planning authority formed by the Greater London Council (1965-86) and Greater London Authority (Mayor plus Assembly, 2000-)1. Outside it is a mosaic of counties and districts, plus some unitary (all-purpose) authorities for larger towns like Oxford, Reading or Southampton, which until 2004 divided planning responsibilities between them; from 2004, as in the rest of England, strategic planning becomes the responsibility of new Regional Planning Bodies (RPBs). Unfortunately, the old continuous South East Region was divided in 1994 between a “new” South East and a “new” 1 There was a strategic hiatus between 1986 and 2000, filled partially by a London Planning Advisory Committee of the boroughs. East of England Region, with a dividing line that runs right up the middle of one of the principal growth corridors north of London. The Abercrombie Plan, which was implemented with only small variations after World War Two, provided for more than one million Londoners to be “overspilled” to new and expanded towns on the outer side of the Green Belt: eight new towns were started between 1946 and 1950, another three (larger and more distant from London) between 1967 and 1970. But, as this was happening, spontaneous migration took many more people out, and in the process the ring of maximum population growth moved steadily outwards: it was about 25-40 km from London in the 1950s, 35-60 km in the 1960s, 50-80 km in the 1970s, and in the 1980s and 1990s has moved out as far as 100-130 km from London, washing over the boundaries of the South East into the neighbouring South West and East Midlands regions. There have been two main attempts to provide a strategic vision for the development of the region. First, in the 1960s a series of studies and strategies – the South East Study of 1964, the South East Strategy of 1967 and the South East Strategic Plan of 1970 – steadily refined a vision of a polycentric city region with separate medium-sized cities and towns, concentrated on major transport corridors, with wide intervening sectors protected as agricultural land or as high-quality scenic conservation areas. Somewhat vitiated by a shift of policy after 1977/8, when government resources were diverted from the new towns programme into inner city regeneration including the huge Docklands project in east London, it has nevertheless had a major influence on the region’s form and functioning today. Much more recently, the Thames Gateway strategy of 1995 and the Sustainable Communities Strategy of 2003 return to the idea of corridor or sector development along highly-accessible transport corridors, with a new emphasis on exploiting the potential of high-speed rail. This is particularly marked in Thames Gateway, where the new 300 kilometre/hour high-speed line from London to the Channel Tunnel, due to be completed in 2007, parallel to the M2 and M20 motorways, was re-routed to serve stations which would serve as nodes of regeneration at Stratford (East London) and Ebbsfleet (North West Kent). But other transport routes and corridors play a role in the 2003 strategy: the West Coast Main Line from London to Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool, plus the Midland Main Line to Leicester, Derby and Nottingham, both operating at 200 km/hr., and the parallel M1 motorway form the basis for major expansions at Milton Keynes, Northampton (both new towns of the 1960s), Wellingborough, Kettering and Corby (a new town of the 1950s), 80-130 km from London; the East Coast Main Line and the London Liverpool Street-Cambridge, plus the M11 motorway, form the basis for another growth corridor including Harlow, a former new town, Stansted airport and new communities around Cambridge. An important difference in emphasis since the influential Urban Task Force report of 1998 is that these and other developments are supposed as far as possible to use recycled brownfield land. In part this has shaped the choice of locales for development, with extensive areas of old quarries in Thames Gateway and up the M1 corridor, as well as old dock or industrial areas in the former corridor and old airfields around Cambridge. And, in contrast to the 1960s strategies, there is a deliberate under-emphasis – in fact, a non-emphasis, on the entire western side of the region: from Milton Keynes/Aylesbury, all the way southwards and eastwards to the Channel Tunnel, there are effectively no proposals. Of course, development will have to take place here, to meet local demand and to make up for a serious shortfall throughout the late 1990s and beyond, as housing completions fell to their lowest peacetime level since 1924. Underlying this are political tensions: local planning authorities, particularly lower-level district authorities, tend to have a strongly anti-growth bias reflecting the preferences of their local voters: NIMBYism (Not in My Back Yard) tends to reign. But from 2004 they will be subject to higher-level Regional Spatial Strategies, a new concept deriving heavily from the ESDP, which will be binding on them and which – now the government’s devolution project has been abandoned – will come from non-directly-elected authorities, the RPBs: a major democratic deficit. This conflict is not fully appreciated by local electorates at the time of writing; but it could play an increasingly contentious role as the implications sink in. 8. Governance and Planning: Future Options Against this background, we can consider possible alternatives for the future governance and planning of this vast region. We start from the existing position: governance and planning are effectively divided between central government and no less than five Regional Planning Bodies – all of London, all of the South East, most of Eastern England, and small parts of the South West and East Midlands. Faced with this extraordinary complexity, Government has chosen to simplify it by in effect creating a national strategic plan: the Sustainable Communities Plan. This has two elements: a growth corridor strategy for the Greater South East Mega-City region (population 18.98 million) and a growth strategy for six contiguous city regions – in effect a second UK Mega-City region – in the M62 Liverpool-Hull corridor (population 11.36 million): together, 61.7 per cent of the entire English population. The central question is whether there is any realistic alternative. There seem logically to be three. 1. A single Regional Planning Body. This has the merit of being logical. But to hand over responsibility for planning more than one- fifth of the land area and two-fifths of the population of England to a single regional planning body, however theoretically correct, is hardly practical politics. No single German Land is relatively as large as this; nor is any of the planning regions of France, nor any of the Spanish Autonomous Regions. To complicate this solution further, since the debacle of the regional devolution vote in the North East, there appears no way that such a region could be given democratic legitimacy, even assuming any government would contemplate this. 2. Multiple City Regions. In the wake of the North East vote, there is increasing interest in reorganising local government on the city region principle, as recommended by the Redcliffe Maud Commission on Local Government in England in 1969 (G.B. Royal Commission 1969) but rejected by the Heath government.