GOOD Speech by Brett Herron,
GOOD Secretary-General & Member of Provincial Parliament
11 June 2026
*Note to Editor: This speech was delivered during the Provincial Parliament sitting on the proposed amendments to the Western Cape Land Use Planning Act (LUPA).
These amendments to the Western Cape Land Use Planning Act deserve scrutiny, because they simultaneously strip minimum public participation requirements and weaken the spatial planning safeguards this province depends on.
Land-use decisions are not merely technical exercises.
They shape people’s daily lives.
Where people live.
How far they travel to work.
Whether children have access to schools.
Whether communities are integrated or further fragmented.
These amendments cut at both participation and planning integrity at once.
On participation:
Clauses 14, 15 and 16 repeal the mandatory minimum notice and consultation requirements of Sections 43 and 44, and halve comment periods from 60 to 30 days.
In a country still defined by deep spatial inequality, minimum participation standards are not procedural luxuries, they are constitutional necessities.
Stripping them does not produce efficiency. It produces exclusion.
On spatial frameworks:
Clause 6 rewrites the consistency standard.
Developments will now need only to avoid conflicting with a spatial development framework’s main goals, rather than positively aligning with its specific designations.
Bodies like the Cape Town Municipal Planning Tribunal will have even less reason to enforce these frameworks rigorously.
Over time, this hollows out the very tools designed to undo the spatial legacy of apartheid.
What is the point of carefully crafted spatial plans if they can be routinely sidestepped?
What does it mean for spatial justice when speed and convenience begin to outweigh inclusion and coherence?
Efficiency matters.
But once minimum participation standards are stripped away and planning frameworks are diluted, the costs are not procedural, they are structural, enduring, and borne by the most vulnerable.
These amendments, in their current form, cannot be supported.
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