ONE of the surprises of the Belfast City Airport parking row is that we have a partly Soviet economy. To run a rival car park near the airport, businessman Pat Boal must "identify a need" to the Planning Service. Allowing market forces to dictate the success of competing private businesses is apparently too bourgeois to contemplate. Naive souls might wonder why planning permission is required at all, when Boal Airport Parking operates out of the existing multi-storey car park at Ikea, therefore involving no change of use, design, visual impact or any other obvious planning concern.
The requirement to identify a need arises from one of those sequences of policies that make planning stories a nightmare to explain. In summary, private car parks fall under transport so there is a case that they have to be planned alongside public transport.
There are two immediate problems with that argument in this instance. First, Belfast City Airport never fails to cite the sanctity of market forces in its competition with Belfast international Airport. Is that not also a 'transport planning' issue? Second, the requirement to identify a need is creeping into other planning policies, most notably housebuilding and out-of-town retailing. How long before the Planning Service is the Five-Year Planning Service? Even worse than the ideological dubiousness of the airport parking decision is its appearance of a u-turn after the fact.
Boal Airport Parking has been operating since 2011. it was told it needed planning permission for a change of use, which was recommended for approval by the Planning Service in February 2013. When it came before Belfast City Council's Town Planning Committee DUP councillor Adam Newton asked for a deferral. Last month, having met Belfast City Airport, The Planning Service reversed its recommendation for approval.
By that point, Boal Airport Parking had been trading successfully for nearly three years. Mr Boal had undertaken a survey of his customers, but was told this "wasn't relevant". Meanwhile, Belfast City Airport was discovered to have plans to extend its own car park. If none of this identifies a need, how is a need supposed to be identified?
The Planning Service has taken legal advice and is satisfied that it can stand over its decision. SDLP planning minister Mark H Durkan agrees. However, almost any planning decision can be justified from the welter of policy documents and the procedures for approval, as sagas such as the John Lewis superstore make clear. Planning, like most law and policy, becomes unavoidably more subjective as it becomes more complicated.
The answer to this is usually seen as an appeals mechanism but that just adds a final subjective decision. It is the finality itself that stops subjectivity turning into endless arbitrariness, with all the risk that carries of abuse of process. That is why we have the ancient concept of double-jeopardy, preventing those found innocent from being prosecuted again. It is why we have Article 7 of the human Rights Act, against 'retroactivity', preventing people from being punished for things that were not illegal at the time.
There is a distinct whiff of retroactivity about the Planning Service's u-turn on Boal Airport Parking, coming as it did through a bizarrely insurmountable technicality raised at the very last stage in the approval process.
Councillor Newton has confirmed that he was asked by Belfast City Airport to intervene. Friends of the earth was among those to promptly ask if the airport is a DUP party donor, which the airport has had to deny.
The ban on revealing political donors in Northern Ireland creates this paranoia and the parties who insist on secrecy have only themselves to blame. However, even if the ban is lifted, as secretary of state Theresa Villiers has said she intends to do, that will not allay the spectre of parish pump politicians being lobbied by commercial interests to put competitors out of business via arcane planning rules. This fear can only grow as the new super-councils assume extra planning powers. Councillor Newton's actions are almost more remarkable for the lack of a party donation, as a number of his east Belfast constituents now face losing their jobs at Boal Airport Parking.
The DUP likes to say Northern Ireland is "open for business". The signal it has just sent investors and entrepreneurs is that they can be shut down effectively at random if their business succeeds a little too well.