Sam Stafford's Blog

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...