One of UKR’s continuing themes is “rebalancing the economy”. The Prime Minister and other Ministers have used the phrase repeatedly. We think it remains a key task for central government within a more localist approach. We have described it as the risk of “winner takes all”. The second question in our original assessment of the NPPF was therefore
- Does the NPPF help create a balance of economic growth across the country?
So does the NPPF offer anything? The short answer is “No”.
The longer answer depends on how you see the idea of “growth” (both economic and physical) playing out against the more traditional ideas of “deprivation”. We presume Government would take the view that the overall national benefit is greater if we encourage maximum growth in all places and that we should not view this as a zero sum game. Maybe focusing on the bigger cake is better than worrying about how to share out the smaller cake.
This is one of the perennial regeneration debates and we will come back to that in further analysis of the Government’s toolkit
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