The Future of the Planning Profession

It was a privilege to be invited and a pleasure to deliver the University of Reading's annual 'Planning Futures' lecture yesterday evening. The event was part of celebrations to mark fifty years of planning teaching at Reading and, linked to that, the theme was ‘The Future of the Planning Profession’.

This is what I said...

One of the keys to planning consultancy, I learnt, is expectation management. I mention that at the outset because I have never delivered a lecture before, which is why it was such a privilege to be invited to address you all this evening and such a pleasure to accept.

The topic, the future of the planning profession, was daunting initially by dint of it’s vastness, but then I took comfort in it’s vastness because it occurred to me that nobody, let alone me, would be able to do justice to it in the time available. I have sought to tackle it by contemplating some of the things that are exercising me at the minute and that I would try to do something about it if it was my turn to spend twelve months or so being the Housing and Planning Minister.

Please allow me in the first instance though to introduce myself. My name is Sam Stafford and I am a town planner. I thought it worth sharing with you some of the formative experiences from my career to date so that you can see, figuratively speaking, where I am coming from.

Something else to mention at the outset before I do is that anything I say this evening that sounds like a bland, corporate platitude could be my employer’s opinion and that anything I say that is even remotely interesting will be my own personal opinion.

I did not know what town and country planning was when I filled in my UCAS form. I knew that I was going to university, but with no calling at that stage I simply covered up the names of courses down one side of a guidebook and read down the list of required A-Levels on the other until I found geography and economics. Town and Country Planning it was.

There was a module in the fourth year at Manchester called something like ‘Career Development & Orientation’ and it included guest speakers who actually worked in planning. One was a sharp-suited firebrand consultant from DTZ whose impact I can remember even if her name I cannot. After three and a half years of lectures about town planning theory her tales of town planning fact were revelatory. There is a Simpsons in which Mr Burns offers career advice to Lisa’s class. ‘Family, religion, friendship’, he says. ‘These are the three demons you must slay if you wish to succeed in business.’ That address was in a similar vein.

Her advice was, because the sector is so broad, to seek out five roles from across it during the first ten years of your career. In so doing, her reasoning went, you would have a breadth of experience and knowledge to draw upon and a choice of Director-level opportunities open to you as you headed into your thirties. I set out in the year 2000 as a Land & Planning Executive with a small housebuilder in South Yorkshire with that plan in mind

Still though planning was not a calling as such. I was looking for a job, any job, and, once I had found one, I was counting down the days until my next trip to London to so see my mates not the days until I could apply for chartered membership of the RTPI. It would be a bit of an exaggeration to call it an epiphany during my second job, at a small planning and landscape practice in Lincolnshire, but it did occur to me during that spell that I was no more or less capable than anybody else I had come across to that point, from which I started to take confidence that I could do whatever town planning was. I also found that I was actually quite enjoying it. It was from then that the job started to become more of a vocation and I began to think more seriously about a career and how it could progress. I started reading things because I actually wanted to and not because I had to.

The third stop on my sectoral tour was as a development control officer in Calderdale, which is where I have lived since. I recall being invited to slow down by one of the old lags having topped the quarterly application determination charts from a standing start. I would have liked to have spent longer there, and did not mind doing the work of a senior officer for the salary of a junior officer, but when a recruitment consultant came calling, offering 30% more money (and the opportunity at that time for a nicer honeymoon), my head was turned.

Up until 2008 I had either got every job that I had applied for or been tapped up by recruitment consultants about something. I remember speaking at a conference in the depths of the credit crunch and chatting with the other speakers before it kicked off. The conversation was dominated by the economic outlook and an older chap sought to console the younger members of the ensemble with the advice that everybody should expect to endure four recessions during their career. That was a perspective that I had neither thought about nor needed until then.

I do sometimes think of that consultant from DTZ and wonder whether she was ever made redundant, as I have been twice, for as much as her advice was sound enough in principle, were I to ever offer it to an impressionable class of final year students I would add the caveat that, in practice, a career can no more be planned as a town can be planned. Your destiny is never entirely in your own hands, but life, and indeed planning, can be more interesting for that.

I have been thrown off of the horse twice and I have got back on the horse twice. My housebuilding experience and penchant for the politics of planning led me into strategic land promotion and, after a few other twists and turns, I have been working for a major housebuilder for the last seven and a bit years.

So far so unremarkable. You will probably and legitimately still be asking yourselves why I have been invited to address you on an occasion as auspicious as one to mark fifty years of planning here at Reading.

To answer that I go back to the Tib Street Tavern in Manchester and a pint that I was having three years ago with my friend Paul Smith whilst watching England in the West Indies. We were chatting, as one does, about what we were watching on Netflix and what podcasts we were listening to and so on, and Paul suggested blithely that somebody should make a podcast about planning. That sounded like a fun hobby and, with a commitment from another friend, Kevin Whitmore, that he could secure sponsorship, the 50 Shades of Planning Podcast was born.

One recent episode in particular, and an accompanying 50 Shades blog, did attract quite a bit attention and I will come back to that shortly, but it is the podcast that I can thank for the opportunity to be here now.

So to the future of the planning profession.

I have been intrigued since the 2018 Raynsford Review by the notion that planning could be at it’s lowest ebb.

“Planning is surely in a poorer state than it has been since 1947. Too often we are licensees for developers rather than creators of better places. We are holding things together well enough, but imaginative visions for the future of our country, or our towns and cities, are conspicuous often only by their absence”, wrote former Chief Planning Inspector Chris Shipley at the time of the review’s publication.

“Planning in England is less effective than at any time in the post-war era, with an underfunded and deeply demoralised public planning service, conflicting policy objectives, and significant deregulation”, stated the report itself.

Continuing that theme, in November last year Catriona Riddell wrote in Planning magazine about low morale in LPAs, citing the increasingly divisive nature of development; the expectation that planning departments can do much more with much less; and the breaking down of relationships between officers and members.

Then just recently a half year report from Redrow Homes stated that “it is clear the planning system is now at its lowest point for a number of years", citing planning issues as a factor behind the fall in its number of completions. The report also stated that resourcing issues within LPAs and the impacts of losing staff to the private sector are being compounded by the bureaucratic and unacceptably slow system. 

Looking across the warning lights on the planning system dashboard there are few that are flashing. I am going to consider five of them: local plan coverage, development management, the appetite for reform, “levelling up” and a nascent built environment culture war.

The local plan system is grinding to halt. As Planning magazine has reported recently, at least ten LPAs (seven in the Greater South East and nine with Green Belt) have either withdrawn, paused, or delayed their plans over the past six months. Matthew Spry, senior director at Lichfields, has said that it is a decade since the local plan making system was in as poor a state as it is today. The sixteen local plans adopted last year was indeed the lowest since the NPPF was adopted ten years ago.

We have a plan-led system where there are few carrots to incentivise LPAs to progress them and no threat of a stick if they do not. That is perhaps an inevitable consequence of local plans taking on a burden in many policy areas that should be carried at a much higher level of governance. Even so, council leaders such as those in Welwyn feel suitably emboldened presently to cock a snook at the Planning Inspectorate knowing full well that the government will not intervene and that the worst case scenario even if it did, of withdrawing a plan and starting again, is actually not that bad a scenario.

Development management is fairing little better. The proportion of major residential applications decided on time fell recently to 81%, which is the lowest level for five years. That is perhaps little wonder given what life for planning officers on the front is like.

The podcast and blog that I mentioned and that attracted quite a bit of intention were inspired by a 50 Shades listener getting in touch with me to suggest an episode on the local authority staffing crisis. To inform that episode I launched a 'Call for Evidence', inviting people across the profession to share their thoughts, anonymously, on what life is actually like on the front line. It became apparent quite quickly that justice would not be done to the twenty submissions that I received, the majority from DM officers, in an hour-long podcast recording so I reproduced them in full and unedited on my blog. The last time I checked that blog had been viewed over 11,500 times, which perhaps speaks to the scale of the issue and the strength of feeling about it.

The blog does make for uncomfortable reading. Joey Gardiner described it in Planning magazine as a ‘veritable howl of despair’. “It portrays a system on the edge”, wrote Joey, “manned by staff crushed by overwork and pandemic isolation, and suffering regular abuse from the public and even members”.

The submissions, which I would urge you all to read if you have not already, lay bare cultural issues that may have been exacerbated by the pandemic, but long pre-date them. They also lay bare the practical impact of the financial pressures that LPAs are under.

A 2019 analysis by the Institute for Fiscal Studies revealed that gross spend on planning and development was reduced by 42% per person between 2009/10 and 2019/20. Net spend reduced by 60%, which was the largest reduction across all areas of local government.

“Anything that anyone might see as a luxury has been under pressure,” Paul Seddon of Nottingham City Council told Planning magazine. “Unless it’s statutory, or it brings in income, or if you don’t do it then the consequence is intervention, then it is being cut back,” he said.

So what then of the reform agenda? What hope have we there of improvements to these systemic failures. Well none actually. As you will have read, planning reform, for the time being at least, is dead. In a mere eighteen months we have gone from a Planning White Paper proposing to tear the system down so as to start again to some sensible ‘tidying up’ measures being added instead to a Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill.

This, I would contend, is regrettable. Whilst governments, secretaries of state, ministers and white papers come and go there did seem to be an opportunity at the start of this parliament to do something substantive. A reformist government had been elected with a healthy majority and the housing crisis seemed fairly high up on the electorate’s list of priorities.

Time will tell as to what the volte-face should be attributed to and, whilst the politics of the Chesham & Amersham by-election is an obvious factor, two others came to my mind.

Firstly, it seemed to me that the attitude of the collective planning profession went from enthusiastic curiosity about ‘zoning’ at the start of the White Paper consultation period to wary scepticism by the end of it. It is interesting to look back now at the appearances of Christopher Katkowski (proponent) on ‘Have I Got Planning News For You’ in the August of 2020 and Lord Carnworth (opponent) in the October. They are available to view on You Tube if you have not seen them.

Lord Carnworth’s view was that “the aim should be to build on the strengths of the existing system, reduce the clutter, and ensure adequate resources, in terms of finance and personnel; and above all to provide a period of policy stability to allow the reformed system to settle down and gain public understanding and confidence”. His was the view that prevailed. It is better the devil you know perhaps.

Or perhaps the profession took an attack on it’s system as an attack on planners generally, thus making an objective assessment of the White Paper that bit harder. The present system though could plainly be improved. Not only, as I said, is local plan after local plan collapsing in the south of England, but the tilted balance allows appeal after appeal to be upheld and planning officer after planning officer concludes that they could make a more positive impact on society by working for a private sector company with firm ESG commitments than remaining in the public sector.

When asked if the planning system could be made to work if it was simply better resourced, Katkowski said “You cannot be serious! Are you joking?”

The second nail in the White Paper’s coffin was probably the nakedly cynical ‘developer’s charter’ narrative that was not only allowed to emerge and take hold, but nobody championing the cause of the White Paper ever pushed back against. It was typical of the quality of debate around the White Paper that it’s demise was reported by the Telegraph as “a controversial new planning law which would have allowed uncontrolled building in parts of the country”. Obviously the details needed to be fleshed out, but to my unsophisticated mind the White Paper would have supported the primacy of plan-led development by raising the bar for establishing the principle of development on sites out with a plan.

A ‘Growth Area’ could have been the equivalent of a current allocation, but with a vague list of policy aspirations replaced by detailed design codes. A ‘Renewal Area’ could have been anywhere where any form of redevelopment would be supported, again supplemented by codes of a complexity commensurate to the circumstances. The trading estate on it’s last legs, for example; or guidance on where clusters of tall buildings might be appropriate; or those rows of terraces around a tram or tube stop suitable for ‘gentle densification’. A ‘Protection Area’ could have been absolutely everywhere else, subjecting, conceivably, every green field to the same ‘very special circumstances’ test that currently applies only to Green Belt.

The ‘developer’s charter’ confection was allowed to include the claim that, in relation to ‘Growth Areas’, communities would have ‘no right to say what is built in them’, which, regardless of how the White Paper proposals might have played out, is manifestly nonsense. Democratic involvement is simply moved upstream to a single point at which the principle of development is established, which is surely where it belongs.

In thinking about the future, let us compare that imagined scenario to the extension of the status quo. Local plans do not progress (and often collapse) because of three main factors: Green Belt, housing numbers and cross-boundary issues. There are no proposals in the Levelling Up White Paper to address these issues and they require more than sensible tidying up measures to remedy them. Where local plans are out of date, or where a LPA cannot demonstrate a five year supply of deliverable housing, or where a LPA has failed the Housing Delivery Test, planning applications are assessed against a presumption in favour of sustainable of development. I read recently that “Worthing’s decision to reject plans for 475 homes on a site that it wants to designate as a "green gap" in its emerging local plan has been overturned by a planning inspector on appeal, after he found a "considerable" housing land supply shortfall”. Going back to Lord Carnworth’s view on the White Paper, what do we suppose that that decision will do for public understanding of, and confidence in, the planning system in Worthing? This type of decision is repeated week after week in authority after authority.

If you all were designing a planning system from scratch, would it look more like that imagined by the White Paper or more like that through which we try to navigate presently? The answer is surely the former. Whether we got there in one go or in five goes is now a moot point obviously, but it seems valid to ask those in the ‘better the devil you know’ camp whether more progress would have been made by being a bit more open to fleshing out the White Paper’s ideas rather than now having to pin hopes on a magic money fairy paying our council offices a visit.

To the Levelling Up White Paper.

As I went through it I was reminded of an F. Scott Fitzgerald quote. The test of first-rate intelligence, he said, is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function. Levelling Up poses the same challenge.

On the one hand the White Paper’s twelve bold, national missions are to be achieved by 2030. On the other hand forty different schemes or bodies were introduced to boost local or regional growth between 1975 and 2015, which equates to roughly one a year.

On the one hand levelling up has been, ‘from day one’, the defining mission of this government. On the other hand the White Paper was 856 days in the making and might only have been published when it finally was to distract from ‘Partygate’.

On the one hand City Region Sustainable Transport Settlements, with an investment package of £5.7bn for eight English city regions, will transform local transport networks through London-style integrated settlements. On the other hand not only is Transport for the North not even mentioned in the document it is actually having it’s funding cut by 37%.

On the one hand devolution and local leadership are fundamental to levelling up. On the other hand there is no transformative institutional reform; city and regional leaders will still wield nowhere near the financial and political clout enjoyed by their counterparts across Europe; and the government will still control, for example, how many magazines a local authority is able to publish.

As I said, there is nothing in there of substance about Green Belt, housing numbers and cross-boundary issues, so what then of the ‘sensible tidying up measures’.

On the one hand, the Levelling Up White Paper states that ‘a strong planning system is vital to level up communities across the country and give them a say in how their land is used and where beautiful, sustainable houses are built’, which is encouraging. On the other hand of the one page dedicated to planning reform there are mere tokenistic references to ‘Project Speed’ (permitted development rights for things like schools and colleges), the Build Better Build Beautiful Commission, the National Model Design Code, the Office for Place and digitisation.
One of the most striking things about the Levelling Up White Paper to me is that even now, seven years after Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State responsible for culling strategic planning, departed Marsham Street, those words dare not be mentioned in even a White Paper let alone anything more substantive.

“A well-directed spatial strategy”, the White Paper states, “would address two market failures at source – the first affecting left-behind places, the second affecting well-performing places. By correcting these market failures, potential opportunities and growth are unleashed in places affected by these market failures. In other words, by addressing place-based market failures, place-based strategies can grow the pie. They are about unleashing opportunity and boosting allocative efficiency, not redistribution between places per se. That is the essence of levelling up.”

The author, or authors, of the Paper get as far as a ‘systems’ approach and ‘hard-wired spatial considerations’, but then either did not make what is not even a great leap to including strategic planning within the ‘devolution framework’, or did join those dots and were told to unjoin them.

Why does strategic planning remain so taboo? I wrote a blog some time ago about YouGov polling that asked whether decisions to site new towns or major new housing projects should be taken nationally, regionally or locally. 76% of people were happy for such decisions to be taken at a greater-than-local level, which, I took to mean then and I still take to mean now, that the public accept there are some decisions that need to be made in the public interest and for the greater good.

Finally, in surveying the current scene, there is Catriona Riddell’s point about the increasingly divisive nature of development, which I would actually go further with and describe, as I say, as having the feeling of a nascent built environment culture war.

In the spirit of narrow self-interest that sees local councillors put their short-term electoral prospects ahead of the long-term health of their communities, I do sense a growing rancour between growing YIMBY and NIMBY lobbies.

Given broader cultural, media and political trends it was perhaps only a matter of time before the built environment was subject to the same us versus them, progressive versus regressive factionalism that mars other aspects of public policy and debate.

Whilst, of course, the NIMBY label can be worn well by those wrapping up the protection of their own house price in a cloak of pseudo-environmentalism, it can detract from the community champions that are just trying to champion their communities. Similarly, whilst, of course, the YIMBY label can be worn well by those in their cosy conservation areas who might just be able to see from their en-suite window the towers they are so keen to support next to their nearest tube stop, it can detract from the campaigners selflessly doing their bit to awaken the silent unhoused majority and change public perceptions of new development.

Alas though, for the reasons I outlined earlier, it is not hard to see why we are where are. For the stereotypical NIMBY, appeals like that one in Worthing, especially where a parish council has gone through the aggravation of getting a neighbourhood plan in place, add to the sense that planning is being done to them. Whilst those appeals are being defended by the LPA, for the stereotypical YIMBY, no planning is being done for anyone. They will park their bike next to a half-occupied trading estate within a two minute walk of a tram stop and ask their Twitter followers why it has not yet come forward for development.

Who knows? I may be making too much of that, but it is not hard to imagine a YIMBY versus NIMBY narrative continuing to take hold. It is simplistic, it is antagonistic, and it is easy to perpetuate, which makes it perfect culture war ammunition.

I return then to the notion that planning is at it’s lowest ebb.

I will have been working for twenty two years this year and I am struggling to recall a time when there were no warning lights flashing on the planning system dashboard.

Planning is, was and will forever be a political football and the profession’s fortunes, and therefore it’s impact, will ebb and flow as elections come and go. The 1947 system, for example, and as I understand it, was operational for only six years before major reform in 1954 removed the ‘betterment’ provisions by abolishing the development charge. A new government making it’s mark on the planning system is as inevitable as the changing of the seasons and the tides of the sea.

To ask the question as to whether planning is at it’s lowest ebb is to accept that there has already been some high water mark or golden period in the past. Is that really right? Has this decade been any more positive or negative for the profession than the previous one? Comparing planning across different eras is like comparing cricket teams from different eras. It makes for an interesting conversation in the pub, but, ultimately, it is pointless. Times change, societies change, and a yearning for a nostalgic, utopian, romanticised past that never really was surely does not fit with planning’s progressive, forward-looking mandate.

That being said, we obviously face some challenges at present.

Some are deep-seated and cultural. As Clive Betts MP, Chair of the Levelling Up, Housing and Communities Committee said to me once, in the Netherlands planning is seen as part of the solution, but in the UK planning is seen as part of the problem. Local plan-making, for example, is not statutory LPA function and we do not have a spatial plan for England. Why is that?

Some challenges are hopefully ephemeral, such as what feels like a greater propensity at present for every actor in the system, be they minister, MP, councillor, local resident, developer or sharp-suited firebrand consultant, to be putting their own narrow self-interest above all else. Planning, as my principle officer at Calderdale once told me, is a game, but it does not have to be a zero sum one.

Some challenges are very much practical. It is not beyond the realms of comprehension that, if current trajectories are projected forward, and if we stand passively by, things could get worse. The toxicity of planning for housing is sucking the life out of the system to the detriment of everything else that a plan-led system could be contributing to. Similarly, on the current course, it is perfectly reasonable to imagine a future in which there will be no interaction at all between an applicant and a planning officer. Applications might be submitted and, six months or so later, and decision might be granted.

And so, as our forebears did before us and future generations of planners yet to come will have to do, we push back and make the positive case for planning.

Just think about all of the things that planning not only can do, but is doing, often despite the plan-led system rather than because of it. Health, well-being, skills, transport, environmental protection, town centres, climate resilience, net zero, ’15 minute neighbourhoods’, low traffic neighbourhoods, ‘place-making’ and on and on. Now think about how much more could be done in those areas if the elephants in the room, Green Belt, housing numbers and cross-boundary issues, can be dealt with.

Think again about all of the things that planning is doing. Now think about how much more could be done with space afforded for more actual visioning, which, along with everything other the very barest of bones has largely been burnt away as the system has been desiccated to the extent that only a regulatory function remains.

Think again about all of the things that planning is doing. Now think about how much more could be done if every A-Level student doing geography and economics knew what town and country planning is.

We need to promote the role of the expert; the professional planner; the technocrat; and we need to put the integrity of the planning system above all else because if we do not then we cannot expect the minister, MP, councillor, local resident, developer or sharp-suited firebrand consultant to.

The RTPI’s tagline used to be ‘the mediation of space, making of place’, and my sense is that most people would happily put their faith in a planning system that mediated their private interests in an accessible public forum. The politics of planning will change constantly, but that, as our guiding principle, should not.

Planning is not a black and white endeavour, there are fifty shades in between, but unlike other fields on which phoney cultural turf wars are being fought, there are rules and there are referees. The referees are us planners and the rules are defined by the system. Everybody should be able to put their faith in it.