Sam Stafford's Blog

According to the Eton College website, the sporting activities offered to students include: beagling, croquet, fencing, polo, and the 'Wall Game' (no idea...). Planner-bashing is not advertised, but it's not hard to imagine Messers Cameron and Osborne being schooled in it's ancient arts there as well.   The school analogy also extends to imagining a bully seeking a veneer of strength by picking out a soft target. Certainly in a climate of anaemic economic recovery, it is easy to point the finger at the planning system.   With the ink still drying on the NPPF , the Growth & Infrastructure Bill was introduced to parliament last month and is due to be fast-tracked on to the statute books by April 2013. The usual rhetorical flourishes apply (“helping the country compete on the global stage”, "cutting excessive red tape”,etc).   Picking up on the idea that there are thousands of jobs locked in Town Hall filing cabinets, the...

It is not uncommon now, indeed it is perhaps more common than not, for LPAs to charge for pre-planning application discussions (pre-apps). The justification being, perfectly legitimate, that pre-apps divert valuable officer time from the determination of planning applications and that that time needs to be compensated for.   For the first time recently though I have heard that one Greater Manchester authority has actually scrapped pre-apps altogether, forbidding officers to engage in discussions about any site that is not the subject of an application. Whilst this authority has seen it's number of officers dwindle and no doubt views this approach as making best use of it's resources, I cannot help but wonder whether this does actually represent a false economy.   There are perhaps two implications of a LPA not engaging with prospective developers or promoters at the pre-application stage. Firstly, developers or promoters that are risk-ave...

I've been tweeting planning news for a little while (@samuel_stafford), but have found that there is so much going on that it's difficult to condense news into 140 characters! I'm going to use this blog to provide more information on planning news and also take the opportunity to include some thoughts and opinions as well.