Sam Stafford's Blog

The general election campaign starting pistol has well-and-truly now been fired and the prominence of the housing crisis in the national conciousness means that planning will have a high profile in the respective campaigns. Of the two main parties it is the Conservative’s strategist’s that have the hardest task over the next twelve months. If I had a pound for every time I’d heard “Yes, absolutely, we need new homes, but I just don’t think this is the right place for them (‘The NIMBY’s creed), I’d have, well, a few pounds. How to endorse then a call for new homes nationally whilst at the same time conveying to MPs and residents an impression that there are grounds to object locally? The tangle that students of planning and public policy will remember this Government for is that it sold, and continues to sell, 'local decision-making', when it should have sold 'local decision-making provided that you have a Local Plan that meets objectively assessed housing need and...

"Whilst it is important that we do deliver on housing, it is also crucial that we continue to fight developers who put profit ahead of people, and development ahead of our countryside." So said, Michael Jones of Cheshire East in his Leader's Speech a couple of weeks ago. The council certainly is fighting against the schemes that it considers will deliver the wrong kind of housing. It was confirmed yesterday that it will be challenging the Elworth Hall Farm, Sandbach appeal decision, another where a planning inspector has found that a five year supply of deliverable housing land cannot be demonstrated. There is at least a consistency to this approach, but coincidentally I understand that at the same time as the Council was confirming this challenge a judge at the Administrative Court in Manchester was dismissing the challenge it made in December to the Congleton Road, Sandbach appeal decision, which also found that there was not a demonstrable five year suppl...

I wrote a piece back in December that was inspired in part by the news that 87% of respondents to a DCS Planning Consultancy Survey agreed that a shortage of planning staff is a major constraint on timely decision-making. That led me to think about LPA staffing levels across the North West and with the help of my colleague Claire Pegg and a few FOI requests later... North West LPA Planning Staff 2010-2014 Whilst many authorities have a similar amount of full time equivalent (FTE) posts and some teams are actually larger, based upon the information that we have been able to obtain, it is most striking that there are at least 109 fewer LPA planners now than there were in 2010 (though the reduction in the size of the teams at Manchester and Oldham alone represent 42% of that figure). With reports that three in five Councils will have exhausted other ways of making savings by the 2015/16 financial year, further reductions in FTE posts should surely be expected. Given that ...