Episode 158 of 50 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link or Apple and Spotify . Sometimes episode ideas are put to me, sometimes they come to me in the middle of the night, and sometimes I’ll read something and think to myself, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting…’ Back in October last year I came across a blog by Jack Airey, who is now a Director at Public First but was the Head of Planning at Policy Exchange and subsequently spent a few years inside Number 10 as a Special Advisor to the Prime Minister. The opening line of Jack’s blog was ‘How does bad policy get made?’ and he writes about “the war of attrition that is Whitehall policymaking”; backbench pressure; and the “lack of institutional understanding” within government about how the practical impact of policy proposals. I asked Jack if he would be up for talking about these themes on the pod and, pleasingly, he was, so I thought next about who else it would be interesting to hear from about life inside the Westminster poli...
Episode 157 of 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link (or from Apple and Spotify ). Strategic planning is back. What do we know? We know that Policy PM1 of the revised draft NPPF anticipates the move towards national coverage of spatial development strategies, as promised by the end of the parliamentary term, and clarifies their role, content, and relationship to other tiers of the development plan. SDSs are intended to be high-level documents focused on genuinely strategic, cross-boundary issues, leaving detailed policy to other plans. We know that the Planning and Infrastructure Act, the second SDS building block, gained royal assent last month and sets out the process by which authorities, be they Mayoral authorities, combined authorities or combined county authorities should prepare SDSs. We know that the third SDS building block, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (which has reached the committee stage in the House of Lords), will confirm the str...