NATIONAL PLANNING

Wairarapa Times-Age, 13 February 1942, Page 3

NATIONAL PLANNING

CENTRAL AUTHORITY SET UP IN BRITAIN TOWN AND COUNTRY DEVELOPMENT. POST-WAR RECONSTRUCTION. (British Official Wireless.) RUGBY, February 11. Announcing in the House of Commons the establishment of a central planning authority, Mr Greenwood, Minister without portfolio, said the Government had decided that the existing statutory duties in regard to town and country planning exercised by the Minister of Health in England and Wales would be transferred to the Minister of Works and Buildings, Lord Reith, whose title would, with the King’s approval, be changed to Minister of Works and Planning. The Minister's planning functions would be to guide the formulation by the local authorities in England and Wales of town and country planning schemes which would adequately reflect national policy for urban and rural development. The Minister would be assisted by a committee of senior officials, representing the departments concerned, the main functions of which would be to ensure that, as far as possible, the national policy for urban and rural development was carried out as a single and consistent whole. Mr Greenwood declared that in reaching these decisions the Government’s intention had been to secure the most appropriate development and use of the land of Britain, and the Government believed that by procedure of this kind the various activities of the departments concerned in postwar reconstruction, including the speedy provision of houses for those j needing them, the re-development of; devastated areas, the clearance of slums, the relief of overcrowding, the provision of all necessary public services and the general promotion of rural development in the light of a positive policy for the maintenance of a healthy and well-balanced agriculture, could be welded into a single consistent policy. The Government would review the objectives mentioned in the Royal Commission’s report "on the distribution of industrial population and, first, would particularly seek to ensure that fresh development was planned with due regard to the use which could be made of the existing capital equipment and public services and would not wantonly countenance the break-up of old and valuable industrial concentrations. Secondly, the Government would seek to avoid the diversion of productive agricultural land to other purposes if there was unproductive or less productive land that could reasonably be used for those purposes.