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The Assembly has a special web site devoted to the plan and its consultation timetable link. You can download the complete plan in Acrobat format.

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The Civic Trust for Wales welcomes the initiative of the Welsh Assembly Government in producing this document, as a step on the road towards setting out a strategic plan for the whole of Wales. For far too long, Wales has lacked a clear overall vision and has suffered from the divisive influences of its own geography, and institutional structures. So far as the traditional core content of strategic plans is concerned, namely land-use, environment and transportation, this is in serious need of an all Wales framework, especially since the abolition of the eight pre 1996 county councils, and their replacement by some twenty-five local planning authorities.

Also, the Trust applauds the intention of the Welsh Assembly Government to embrace all major services and interests in this strategy, and looks forward with interest to see how such providers as Health, Further Education, Transport Planning and Operation, Inward Investment, Social and Community Services, Retailing, Telecommunications, can be addressed in positive ways. While many of these services are within the remit of the Welsh Assembly Government, others are not; how these are to be incorporated will be of considerable importance in determining the “reach” of the strategy.

As the Spatial Plan stands at present, in the form of this consultation draft, it is obviously still very broad-brush, and appears to be in a formative stage: it reads more like a perspective than a prescriptive framework, which is what the Trust understood to be the aim at the outset of this initiative. While this is not a criticism of the document, merely a recognition of how far the task has progressed, it does inevitably lead on to the question—what type of Spatial Plan is it intended to be, once it is finalised?

Experience elsewhere, both in the UK and beyond, should warn of the danger of it becoming so broad brush as to lack any real substance. The Civic Trust for Wales believes that the Plan should eventually be explicit in its proposals for spatial strategy, such that it interlocks directly with the activities and powers of other arms of governance across Wales. In other words, the Plan should be sufficiently specific in its proposals that any proposals emerging, for example, from a UDP or a Government Agency programme, could be sensibly tested for conformity or compatibility. In saying this, the Trust by no means argues only for a “top-down” approach: what we feel is needed is a means of continuous interaction between the strategic and the local, so that each informs and influences the other.

The Civic Trust for Wales thinks the task of taking this draft forward and arriving at a sufficiently strong strategy, as suggested, is a task extending beyond the powers of the Wales Assembly Government itself. If there is not to be a continuation of the disjuncture between the national and the local, we urge that there should be formal partnership between the Welsh Assembly Government and WLGA to take this approach forward. We look at experience across English regions, where such joint working has proceeded, and believe that there are lessons we can adapt to our needs. Such a concerted approach could allay any fears within local government of a central government “take-over” or intrusion, and might indeed greatly facilitate preparation where needed, or regional or sub-regional frameworks, where groups of local authorities need to work together. Were such a joint approach to prove possible politically, it would then not be difficult to lock in other major interested parties and agencies, both public and private.

The Civic Trust for Wales acknowledges that much of the foregoing comment that we have made is at a level well removed from the day to day focus of the civic trust movement, which is primarily local. Nevertheless, we do see a great value for local communities and civic trust interests, in the successful completion of this Spatial Plan for Wales. We would like to have opportunity in the future to make further contributions, whether at the all Wales level or within the various regional zones identified, and in the process, we would draw upon our own interaction with individual civic societies at the grass roots level.

28 January 2004