The Planner(27)

It should have been quite manageable – he was thirty-two, it wasn’t as if he could claim youthful inexperience. But the big challenge was that he hadn’t been expecting Laura to be anything like this clever or pretty. This should have been a dry run, an evening in which he got to experiment on a guinea pig, someone with whom he could make mistakes, safe in the knowledge that he would be able to hurt her more than she could hurt him. On paper, on email, on the web, Laura had sounded ideal. She worked in economic policy for the public sector, she had a degree from nowhere to get worried about, and the only picture he’d seen, admittedly a small low-resolution image on Rachel’s Facebook page, had given him no cause for anxiety. But the photo had been highly misleading, in fact he was now almost certain that it actually had been Rachel. Laura had a Masters from Cambridge, and although it was true that she did economic policy, she wasn’t one of those well-meaning dumpy girls who worked in regeneration or international development or something. No, it turned out that Laura worked for the fucking Treasury.

In the light of all this, James had, he conceded, selected a poor venue. He had offered to meet round the corner from her office. That seemed to be a determining factor in why she’d agreed to this, and so his main consideration had been to choose a place that didn’t run Friday evening drinks promotions and where sales teams wouldn’t turn up and play drinking games. And so they were in the White Lion, one of those low-ceilinged Whitehall pubs with dark over-varnished furniture and a dun-coloured carpet that looked like it could keep secrets. It was a plotters’ pub, a civil-servant pub, intended not for entertainment but rather to allow melancholy deliberation, the replaying of the day’s events and for planning future ambushes and betrayals. It was a place where things – air, heat, light, words – could be relied upon to stay put, but not a place to take a highly attractive professional on a date. It was almost six years since cigarettes in pubs had been banned, but smoke still seemed to circle mysteriously around their heads.

‘So Rachel tells me you’re another town planner,’ said Laura. ‘One of those types that likes to go around distorting the market for his own opaque purposes?’

James looked at her anxiously. Something else that had become quickly apparent was that, as well as everything else, she was right wing. He should have guessed. It was well known that almost everyone who worked in government at a senior level didn’t actually believe in government. That wouldn’t make for an easy evening. All the right-wing people that James knew, and as he got older there seemed to be more and more of them, were so exhausting, so relentless and harassing to be around – in a way that, once upon a time, left-wing people probably were. The problem was, he was on a date. It was just the two of them. He could hardly ignore her. It wasn’t as if someone else – Felix, for instance, would have been good – was going to pop up and answer questions on his behalf.

‘Planning isn’t about distorting the market. It’s about bringing order, avoiding urban disruption, and ensuring that land resources are used as effectively as possible.’

As he said this, it occurred to him that he was quoting directly from the introductory chapter to one of his old textbooks, and that he almost certainly sounded like a moron.

‘Land prices determine the most productive uses of land – is there really much more to it than that? And are you sure that what you call disruption is not just people getting on with their lives in enterprising ways that you don’t happen to particularly like?’

‘No, of course not. We don’t just impose rules on people for the sake of it. We do things in order to make everyone’s lives better. Better for everyone – we have to think about what’s best for the whole community, the whole city.’

Laura paused to consider this. It was clear that she wasn’t satisfied, and none of what he was saying actually sounded very plausible, even to him. Was that really what he did for a living? He couldn’t remember Lionel ever saying that.

‘I think that the problem with planning, as always with government, is incentives. Either they don’t exist or else they’re the wrong ones. You have strategies and targets and those are intended to motivate you to do certain things. But what you really need is customers.’

‘Well, yes,’ said James. ‘But these things aren’t arbitrary. Targets aren’t just made up for no reason. They’re intended to improve things, to do things like reduce pollution or traffic.’

‘But those targets don’t relate to people’s lives in a direct way. For instance, you’re incentivised by things like reducing traffic on the roads, but why? People want to drive to work. And you’re told to put people close together, high up in small spaces, when in fact most people want the exact opposite. They want to live on the ground, in big houses and gardens.’