Sam Stafford's Blog

Master developers. Not just developers, but master developers. It is a bit like saying that Mr Miyagi was just proficient in karate. No, he was a karate master. To master something is to be beyond proficient. Masters have acquired complete knowledge and skill. Master developers are all the rage nowadays. When Oliver Letwin, from the right, and Nick Raynsford, from the left, are recommending that local authorities play a more active role in the development of large sites, and with the emboldened, muscular Homes England getting in on the act, it is hard to escape the conclusion that master development is the zeitgeist. The master developer role (unkind definition: ‘roads and sewers merchant’, kind definition: ‘place-maker’) has perhaps risen in prominence as a result of two overlapping trends. Firstly, there has been a maturing of the land promotion model that emerged as a result NPPF1 and the ‘presumption of sustainable development’ when local plans are held to be either out-o...

August. I always look forward to August. The summer holidays. The start of the football season. Perhaps a test match or two. For the last few years though my favourite part of August has been my annual review of the progress that is being made towards distributing Birmingham’s long-term housing shortfall across it’s housing market area (HMA) partners.   2015’s blog is here .   2016’s blog is here .   2017’s blog here .   It is now 18 months since the Birmingham Development Plan was adopted and so the deadline (such that it is) for the distribution of the shortfall is now only another 18 months away (which in strategic land terms is the equivalent of Peter Kay’s taxi just turning your corner now). Surely this is the year when substantive progress can be reported?   Alas not.   There was a flurry of excitement in February when GL Hearn’s Strategic Growth Study (SGS) finally emerged in February. This time last year I wrote that a glas...

Local plan coverage has been, is, and will probably always be poor. Or at least if not poor then still some way from complete. Anybody who harbours aspirations otherwise has probably never had any contact with the local plan process. The obstacles to be overcome between an Issues & Options consultation and adoption are technically byzantine (though always surmountable with time), administratively burdensome (also surmountable with time) and, often three years out of four, politically charged (sometimes insurmountable despite long-periods of time). The big ones, Green Belt and the meeting of unmet needs across administrative boundaries, were identified as the key barriers to plan progress in a paper from NLP in 2017.   The tectonic plates that form a plan’s evidence base constantly shift beneath a Head of Planning’s feet and the political pendulum that determines the national policy framework constantly swings above their head. If a LPA does reach the finish line, then it...

"But this is Manchester, we do things differently here", said Anthony H Wilson to Iggy Pop on So it Goes in 1977. It is a quote that companies moving into Manchester like to put on meeting room walls to appear edgy and authentic. It is also a quote that could have been used to announce the news in August 2014 that the ten LPAs in Greater Manchester (GM) had agreed to prepare a joint Development Plan Document (DPD) to set out their approach to housing and employment land for the next 20 years. The Greater Manchester Spatial Development Framework (GMSF). In November 2014 the first GM devolution agreement was agreed and provided for an elected Mayor with responsibility to produce a spatial strategy with the unanimous (an important word) support of his or her Cabinet (the ten leaders).   The GMSF was different because in the post-Regional Spatial Strategy world there were no greater-than-local or sub-regional plans afoot. The GMSF, the development industry hoped, would ...

Garden cities. Who doesn’t like garden cities? Or garden towns? Garden villages maybe? The same thing, but smaller and smaller again. Garden cities are the town planning equivalent of a Sunday evening television programme in which the star of a sitcom from days-gone-by, travelling by something slow and quaint, explores the part of Britain that you holidayed in as a child. Garden cities are comfortable, reassuring and unthreatening, and hark back to a time when public policy was informed by a sense of social justice. Politically, as a result, it should not be possible to lose with garden cities. Free childcare, less bureaucracy for the brave bobbies on the beat, and a new generation of garden towns and villages. Sensible policies for a happier Britain. How could that not poll well in a pre-election focus group? A majority surely beckons. Uh oh! The unelected quangocrats at the Planning Inspectorate are going to find the our local plan unsound if we don’t allocate another 4000...

Placemaking. Who does it, and who do they do it for? Communities. Are they created? If so how, and by whom? These were the weighty questions that came to mind as we watched the second episode of The New Builds Are Coming last week. The first episode was about a draft allocation bomb being dropped upon an unsuspecting rural community. The second episode focused on new communities: from their inception and design to the people who live there. In the ‘frenzy of construction of Oxfordshire’, it was asked, who ‘creates the foundations of community?’ The programme featured two fairly typical urban extensions on the edge of market towns and a smaller scheme on the edge of what planners might call a ‘main rural centre’. Longford Park, Banbury, according to it’s website ( https://www.longford-park.com/ ), is about “far more than new homes, it is a community in the making and a place that people will be proud to call home”. It is being built by Taylor Wimpey, Bovis and Barratt and as...

It is not often that my wife and I watch television together, but last night two of our interests aligned (hers: fly-on-the-wall docu-soaps, mine: concreting over green fields) and so we watched The New Builds Are Coming . (As an early aside, when planning was in the limelight previously the series was called The Planners Are Coming . I wonder why producers feel the need to associate the subject with an impending sense of doom?) There was a discussion about it in the office yesterday morning and I simply expressed a hope that it would feature a plan-led proposal in the hope that this would show the planning system in a better light than a 5YHLS ‘smash and grab’. I also expressed a hope that it would be fair, in that it would portray each actor within the five act play that is the local plan process in the light that they deserve to be. Of those actors, firstly, the developer, or promoter, and the landowner. Neither wanted to engage with the programme, we were told, which could ...