Life on the Front Line II

It was about a year ago that Catriona Riddell first wrote in Planning magazine about low morale in local planning authorities, which Catriona, Peter Geraghty, Paul Brocklehurst and I followed up with the 'Life on the Front Line' 50 Shades podcast episode (no. 60).

'Life on the Front Line' was informed by a 'Call for Evidence', the submissions to which, mostly anonymised, are reproduced on the Life on the Front Line 50 Shades blog post.

Catriona has again used her Planning magazine column to raise the issue of morale in LPAs, making the point that, one year on, it does not feel like things have improved much.

Many of the factors impacting on morale have been well documented, Catriona writes, but whilst there seems to be some general agreement around the causes, little has been offered in the way of solutions.

As Catriona writes, too many authorities are actively discouraging a return to the office, which is not healthy; not conducive to team working; and is unlikely to support the accessibility that planning departments need to offer as a public service. Further, this continuing prioritisation of virtual working affords limited access to both formal training and mentoring, and informal development opportunities for younger, less experienced planners

I would like to revisit Life on the Front Line for another 50 Shades episode that explores in more detail whether and how things have changed over the last year or so. This then is another Call for Evidence, which is open to planners across all sectors and not just those in local government. If anybody would like to send me their thoughts on the issues raised by Catriona, or indeed any other issues that are impacting on your ability to do your job, do please drop me a line to samstafford@hotmail.com and I will add them to another rolling Life on the Front Line blog, anonymously if preferred.

The invitation last year was mostly taken up by junior officers in local government and so I would be especially keen to hear this time from more senior officers and service leaders. What is it like managing people and budgets in the current climate? What are the obstacles to getting people back in the office and how can they be overcome? How has the 'top-down targets' farrago affected relationships with members? As last time though, the invitation is open to planners of all ages and across all sectors.

Submission 1

I read that you were interested in hearing from senior managers about managing people and budgets etc when working at home. 

For me it was not a pandemic that was the catalyst for a move to working from home but the small matter our office is soon to be no more (this is however not officially declared but on the cards).

Nonetheless, whilst working in management at this small authority I have been able to recruit and support team members, determine complex applications and manage budgets as if I was in the office. This is mostly through using Teams channels, emails and video calls where I am still able to have 121 meetings with those involved and ascertain how my staff are getting on and what can be done to improve things to make their working lives better. 

On a more personal note, I did start my career when going in the council offices was mandatory and whilst I did enjoy being able to shadow other planning officers and gain advice from my colleagues I actually still prefer working from home. 

The offices were very busy places, lot of chat and activity, sometimes too loud to concentrate. I love a good Monday morning footy chat like the next guy but some days it could get quite intolerable. 

I feel on the whole I am far more productive at home and as I sit here nursing a chest infection, the thought of going into an office with this would have not had been fair on my colleagues. I can though from home still perform to a decent level and not take any days off. 

Maybe if there was any disadvantage from a managerial standpoint is there needs to be a great level of trust between everyone that work is being carried out as best as it can be. When standards start slipping, one does think that something at home could be distracting them from their work.  When in the office you can possibly see a lot more clues including constantly talking at work, taking longer lunch breaks etc. One can't do that as easily in the current set up. We complete an electronic clocking system. It can be quite awkward bringing this up with that team member you feel might not be performing as they should. 

In summary, I am happy to see remote working continue. I like my home office, I like the ability to just crack on without a pain of a commute and even when illness takes over I can do some work. For those starting out, yes I can see they would possibly like to have more time learning off others to which I'd advise they go out on site with them; some of the best experiences I've had is actually looking at the sites that were to be developed.

Anonymous

Submission 2

In terms of young planners certainly they need to spend time in an office to learn and grow. But overall I think as a manager it is about much more than this. It takes time and effort as a manager to support and grow a team. I joined my team as manager in full lockdown and wasn’t able to meet any of them in person for three months. The service had recently been restructured and I had a combination of long term staff and new people some of whom had never worked in local government before. I have a number of young / new planners in my team and I also took on some work experience candidates, all remote. We had no option at that time, but through regular team events online, managers making themselves available for discussions, getting to know the team through regular 1-2-1s and investing time and support I and others in management positions have built and maintained a good rapport, increased performance, and improved motivation and loyalty. I often get asked if we have any jobs available, by planners in other LAs who do not feel so supported.

We go into the office usually twice a week (offices were built for hybrid / agile working pre covid), one day is our team day and then we choose a second day which works well as policy and DM colleagues as well as other services get to meet and discuss issues. We can do more should we wish, or we may meet on site or in different venues depending on the work we are doing. We also meet socially on a regular basis. 

I have one young planner, a recent graduate, who worked for another authority before joining us. They were 100% online and they much prefer the balance they have now. They have been very positive about the hybrid arrangement they have time away from the office to focus on the reporting and analysis which is a key part of the role. Another young member of my team has also said they enjoy the balance. They work across a number of teams in planning and come into the office regularly. They have family abroad and hybrid working enables them to balance work with family life and they occasionally work remotely from overseas. My 100% lockdown remote work experience person is now in full time employment with us and again is very positive about the hybrid arrangements.

While I agree 100% remote working is not healthy for new planners I think managers need to be creative and responsive to circumstance, seeking continual feedback and acting on it.

I’m really proud of the culture we’ve fostered, feedback is good and my team are motivated and work hard but I’ll never rest on my laurels, it’s dangerous to assume. It’s also, to my mind, dangerous to assume that a set number of days is ‘best’…it’s the WAY it’s managed. So on our team day for example I try and keep it dedicated to my team, and not sit in an office on Teams calls all day.

I could go on, as supporting young planners is something I’m extremely passionate about.

Clare Egginton

Submission 3

Here we are then, a year on. I was one of those original ‘howls of despair’ and, having re-read my submission ahead of writing this piece, I couldn’t have described it better myself. I stand by every single word of it. It really was that bad, a year ago. I’m sure it still is that bad, elsewhere. I don’t have nutrient neutrality or a recently pulled local plan, for starters.

Head of Planning, urban authority. It’s better now. Still frantically busy, still stressful, still with all the usual challenges. This year I’ve churned out 14 Planning Committees, been a witness at a 3 week public inquiry and a local plan examination and in one month alone attended ten in person consultation workshops. And that’s on top of the day job. 

It’s better for one simple reason. The planning team is back in the office far more often, many of us for the majority of the working week. What a massive difference that has made. Apart from the 20% more applications (still!), it’s pretty much like 2019 again. The support system is back around me, and around my colleagues. And we can manage to push ourselves to succeed despite how hard it is because the passion and motivation is back. We operate a hybrid system now, it’s not office or nothing, but we have the critical mass which makes the office somewhere people want to be.

I’m coming back to the question of office vs remote working in a bit, but first of all I want to look at the big picture.

The Big Picture

Nothing really is going to change unless LPAs become a more attractive place to work. I get the sense anecdotally that working in the private sector, particularly the big consultancies, is much easier now. MS Teams has significantly reduced the endless travelling to and from clients’ offices and working flexibly around other commitments is now seen as the norm. The downsides of the private sector, which used to draw people into the public sector, have all but disappeared. At the same time public sector jobs have become much, much harder. It really is no surprise that so many planners have decided to make the move over to the private sector. All you have left in the public sector now are generally those for whom public service is a calling, or, sadly, those who are unable to get a job anywhere else.

There are two things that need to change here. Not only do pay and conditions in LPAs need to better match the private sector (a really hard nut to crack - for which I don’t see any obvious solutions) but most importantly LPAs need to stop farming out the most interesting projects to consultancies.

I’ve been involved in leading a lot of project work this year. I’ve also made the decision to deliver some of it in house. What this has brought home to me is that in the 10 years of austerity, LPAs got rid of all the interesting things that they did. The public sector have been left with the day to day grind and little else. The interesting stuff in the public sector is farmed out to the private sector because of a lack of capacity and a lack of skills. Funding awards are almost always immediately handed to consultants.

It isn’t necessarily that the public sector’s lack of skills is in masterplanning or evidence gathering or whatever it is. It’s that the public sector doesn’t have the skills or ability, especially the digital skills, to illustrate the work. They have the ideas and the knowledge and the analytical skills and often, I find, tell the consultants what to do after they have got it wrong the first time. And LPAs with no budget can’t spend the money on investing in these skills.

When I think what £100k buys me in staffing and what it buys me in consultant output, it is incomparable. £100k buys me two very experienced officers for a whole year. A year. Imagine what they could both do in a year if they had literally nothing else to do but work on a single project, but so many public sector planners are balancing managing huge projects alongside the day job. I certainly am.

We need to start embedding these projects in the public sector - secondments at first, then permanent jobs. We need to be upskilling our own officers. Public Practice are getting this right and I’m delighted to see them extend their offer to the north of England, but even the introduction fee is hard for some LPAs to swallow. We could also start thinking about where LPAs could take advice from consultancies, but then implement that advice themselves, rather than asking for a complete piece of work.

This is a leadership thing, but it also needs government. We need an absolutely cast iron ringfenced planning skills grant. LPAs need to bid for the grant, but they only get it if they can demonstrate that they are increasing capacity and upskilling (through backfilling posts or similar) or investing in digital for their own staff. But if they are doing that, they get it. And we need leaders to be thinking about how they might upskill their own staff, and grow teams, and what their planners would be interested in doing, and what might benefit their area. There is stuff like this going on already, but I get the sense there isn’t nearly enough of it.

Back to the office

I am so glad that finally some voices are genuinely acknowledging the downsides of remote working, especially in planning departments, and particularly DM. We just need some of those people to be in leadership positions in LPAs. Sadly, that still seems to be astonishingly rare.

Frankly, and I’m going to be harsh here, I think people in those leadership positions need to take a good long hard look at themselves, and decide - are they in favour of remote working because it suits them and makes their own lives more convenient - or because they genuinely think it is a better way of working for EVERYONE. And I strongly feel that in a leadership position you often have to do things that you don’t want to and which might inconvenience you, for the overall good of your team and service. I mean, I don’t really want to do tedious HR type work, but I have to, and I do so, because my staff benefit.

What also baffles and infuriates me is a refusal to acknowledge that full time remote working has any downsides at all. It clearly does, significantly so, and we are seeing them play out right now. We’re planners, right? Our whole careers are based around balancing benefits and harms - with mitigation put in place to reduce harms as much as possible, to allow development to proceed. Why on earth can’t we do this balancing exercise with remote working? I do think there is a fear that if the harms are properly acknowledged then it might be taken away completely. I think we can agree that’s extremely unlikely and working patterns have changed for good. So from that starting point, let’s have a sensible conversation.

The downsides of remote working have been more than adequately expressed by Catriona Riddell in her piece for Planning Resource, and they open this blog, so I am not going to repeat them here. However I do just want to dwell on a couple which might not be quite so obvious. 

Site Visits

There are planners out there working in 100% remote roles who won’t go within 100 miles of the sites they are considering. In fact, anecdotally there are reports of applications being dealt with remotely in Australia. It doesn’t actually matter if you’re 10 miles or 10,000 miles away from a site, you can’t truly understand it, or get a feel for a place without actually going there. Google Street View / Earth is a fantastic tool. However it is NOT a substitute for a site visit. It’s rarely up to date, for a start. Neither is asking an applicant or someone else to provide photos, as with the best will in the world context is difficult to understand. How on earth do you sign off a brick sample without seeing it in its true context (normally under a grey sky). How do you put together a key views plan without going and actually looking at the views. My barrister friends are now telling me that the first question they will ask a planning witness is if they have visited a site, because many of them haven’t and then all their evidence thereafter is undermined. We already know anecdotally about a LPA who got 'Ombudsman-ed' for conditioning trees to be retained which had already gone. Because they had only looked on Street View, which was out of date. This will not be the only example. Make your planners GO ON SITE. Planning is about place. You cannot and should not try to replace that.

Leadership and Management

This is the issue that worries me most for the future of public sector planning. It is already hard enough to recruit and retain people who want to either be in or move into management in the public sector. If you isolate people and don’t allow them to learn any management skills, other than through formal taught courses, then it will become impossible. The best leaders and managers I know haven’t got formal management qualifications, but they have an innate sense of how to deal with people. With the best will in the world, you cannot learn that through a screen. The other thing is if you are remote working, you generally only see your line manager, managing you. That is an extremely narrow experience to draw on - and you will not learn how to manage other people and other situations. What I fear though, is that we will only start to really acknowledge this in 5-10 years when it becomes a real problem, and it will be way too late to fix it then.

Heating and the energy crisis

You are not telling me that someone sat in 12 or even 9 degrees in their house, even if they are wrapped up, are doing their best work. It would be illegal for the office to be that cold. But somehow if it’s WFH it’s fine. No. It’s really not, and we shouldn’t be making the staff we have a duty of care for have to do it.

Everyone else in the Council is also still WFH

Things take much longer as a result - Legal will only seal notices once a week for example, so we can only serve enforcement notices on a Thursday. Need a Stop Notice on a Friday? Tough. Silo working between planning and regeneration departments. No idea what anyone is doing, because it needs to be on the radar of formal communication between managers, and if its not, it’s missed. It is very easy to ignore emails, I astonishingly often have to get my boss involved to get an answer to an email out of anyone outside of my team. They couldn’t avoid me if I was stood next to their desk. Lots of these things could work fine in a remote environment, but that takes time and resource to set up that many Councils don’t have.

I believe that it is only by acknowledging both the benefits and the harms of remote working and building a true hybrid working environment that LPAs will need to thrive. And there needs to be enough critical mass of people in the office enough of the time that it is worth going in. So that means more than a handful of people in at any one time, and more than a token and resentful once a week / fortnight / month trip in, spent moaning about not getting any work done because - shock horror - people want to talk to you. If you are a manager it is your job to talk to your team. Even about non-work things - that is how positive relationships are formed. There also needs to be no barrier to people going in as often as they want to, like none of the lights working for 6 months, or no monitors on desks, that sort of thing.

I also think there is a fear that if planning departments ask their staff to come back to the office then they will all leave, or they won’t be able to recruit unless they offer fully remote. Well, I’ve done it. And not one single member of staff has left. There was a bit of an exodus in 2021, when we were still mainly remote but in 2022 I have not lost a single planner. In fact we have recruited eight members of staff in the last 6 months, and they are all required to work full time in the office whilst they train up, and they are all absolutely fine with that. It helps that they know their manager will also be there. There is no shortage of planning jobs in our area, public or private, so it isn’t a matter of not having any prospect of going elsewhere. I do accept that this is easier in urban authorities where commutes are generally shorter and there is a bigger pool of young planners.

Getting back to the office has really helped morale and productivity. I cannot stress enough how much of a difference it has made. There is a buzz of productivity. The feedback (proven by bums on seats and the response to the staff survey) is that they want to be there. It’s a virtuous circle - people come in, so people know if they do come in there will be plenty of company and they will get the benefits of office working, so it’s worth it, so they come in. We often have 30 or more people from the team in the office mid week (that’s about 70%), and a significant number of people are now in either 4 or 5 days a week, including all of my management team. They have each actively chosen this for themselves.

How did I do it? I told people they had to come in a minimum of 2 days a week. This was an absolute requirement. Which days they were was entirely up to them - except if a manager told them they needed to be in for something specific. I also told them there was no upper limit, they could be in the office full time if it suited them. I reminded them of the benefits of office working, particularly round career progression into management. That was back in April. That has given us a critical mass which over this year has slowly increased to a busy office environment with people still enjoying a great deal of flexibility. Some of our parents choose to do shorter days in the office to fit around pick ups, but will come in 3 or 4 days a week. Some team members will come in for part of the day, then go to site and finish WFH. Some WFH more in school holidays, some less. Even Fridays easily see 15 - 20 people in. I have built a huge element of choice around a simple requirement and this means people feel that they have the agency to make it work for them.

I have also noticed that those who have joined us this year with full time office working have progressed further and faster than the young planners who joined us shortly before the pandemic. They are absolutely flying. In fact they are catching some of their slightly older peers up, and my hardest task is to get those young planners who aren’t used to any other way of working to come in to the office a bit more often. And yes, both cohorts have had the benefit of time with their manager and formal training, but one hasn’t had the informal learning, networking and planning by osmosis which takes place in the office.

My plea then, to leaders and managers of planning services, and to leadership teams in Councils more generally, is to make 2023 the year that you bring true hybrid working back to LPAs.

Budgets

A couple of thoughts on budgets. There is no point whatsoever in government increasing planning fees unless the budgets are ringfenced and actually do go into increasing capacity in planning departments, with the authority demonstrating how they have done this. Otherwise they will just be taken as a corporate saving and nothing will change. Also, it doesn’t solve the problem of recruitment as it doesn’t address wages or conditions, or the attractiveness of jobs. There is no point sitting on a load of vacant posts. This comes back to my proposal above for the ringfenced planning skills grant.

Another issue is unrealistic income targets. Over the last 4 years I have had £500k put onto my income target, and unsurprisingly now every year I have a £500k shortfall which has to be made up from elsewhere. Finance know it’s unsustainable, I know it’s unsustainable, but it’s an easy saving. It’s also disproportionate to what other services are offering up. It’s OK at the moment, but the minute it can’t be made up from elsewhere it’s going to be my service which has to make huge cuts to rebalance the budget. £500k is ten posts, or 20% of my service. I don’t even want to think about the repercussions of that.

And a bit of positivity

I am incredibly lucky in many ways. The corporate team understand that a strong planning department leads to a great place, and lets me, most of the time, run it exactly as I please. I have an incredibly diverse and talented group of team managers around me, all of whom are excellent at what they do, but all bring something slightly different. My challenge is to make sure those skills are utilised and they feel sufficiently stretched so that they don’t move on.

I don’t have a seat at the top table, but I know that my viewpoint is represented by those who do. Members are mainly on the same page, and although our Planning Committee can sometimes make some bonkers decisions and it is exhausting being smacked over the head with their particular pet peeve again and again and again, they are otherwise generally a reasonable lot, and our Cabinet Member is brilliant and totally gets it.

In conclusion

So one year on, I’m still exhausted, there’s still a long way to go. However, a year ago I’d almost lost my love for planning and that, at least, is back. I love public sector planning. It has the real ability to genuinely deliver better outcomes for everyone. But it needs a complete overhaul.

So I’ll finish off with this. I’ve been a professional planner for 20 years, and I’ve got 20 or so years to go until retirement. I hope beyond hope that by the time I do retire that it will be from a revitalised, interesting and dynamic public sector. I think it is the responsibility of every planning professional to help make this happen, for the young planners of today. They’re the Chief Planners of the future. We treated them appallingly for two years, let’s make it up to them, starting right now. 

Anonymous

Submission 4

I'm the person that messaged Sam asking if he was planning a 50 Shades episode on the local authority staffing crisis. Whilst 18 months is a long time in the planning world, it is depressing how little has really changed at the coalface.

For a point of clarity I’m a consultee in a different service to my planning colleagues.

As someone who moved into a leadership role during lockdown, and was subsequently been promoted to lead a service area, but not the service, for me the issue has been less around how often the team are in the office and more about the abdication of leadership and manager responsibility combined with the pressure cooker of local government finances.

I have been clear with my teams as to when I am contactable by TEAMs, email, whatsapp, in person and when not and this broadly works for us. My teams are quite happy not to be in the office often preferring home working as it suits them and their life stages. I can’t force them go in daily/weekly but they all know they can go as often as they want but I encourage attendance for certain events. Ironically the biggest disincentive for them attending more regularly is the disruption to their workload from being around colleagues, the hassle of commuting, and the potential fight for a desk. The brilliant idea to adopt a 4 desks for every 10 staff policy, has something of a major downside when more than 40% of the staff turn up...

Whilst budgets and staff recruitment woes are an on-going soap-opera in local government a more corrosive matter is the dearth of talent. As others have said local government is increasingly divided into those who can’t get a job elsewhere (for reasons) and those who want to serve their communities, however the two camps are not mutually exclusive. Far too many highly skilled planners and non-planners have left to join consultancies, take early retirement or try self-employment. So the diminishing talent pool particularly where internal promotion is the cost effective measure thanks to external recruitment freezes is seeing staff promoted far beyond their abilities. The work is as others have said often monotonous with all the good stuff farmed out, reducing the opportunities to try something different and develop different skills.

As a result of the Dilbert principle in action I’ve seen some terrible terrible decision making depress the moral and break the sprit of the planning team. When I survey across the service and look at what is left of the teams compared with two or three years ago I barely recognise it or the skeleton of permanent/non-contractor staff that remain. I can to some extent accept that the lockdown made it hard(er) to manage teams, but to spend over a year before having a team meeting or forgetting who works for you is unforgiveable. But carrying on to today in failing to undertaken the basic managerial responsibilities and actions to check staff wellbeing, undertake appraisals, hold 1:2:1s, sign off reports, or even make decisions is unacceptable. The slopey shoulders approach of the Teflon manager who lets everything slide is toxic, if you take the management pay you must make decisions and be responsible for your and your team’s actions that’s the deal. You know who you are, and we see you very clearly.

Manging people is hard. We need to accept that it is a different skill to being a good planner. Indeed not all planners are managers, and nor do all managers need to be planners. Slashed budgets mean formal training is hard to come by, and I would agree that the textbooks don’t teach everything but they do help formalise and categorise observed behaviour. We all can remember those terrible managers, but how many can remember the good ones and what they did that was much better? For me the good ones all demonstrated a sense of fairness, transparency (as best they could depending on the situation), and responsibility. I certainly didn’t agree with many decisions made but I understood why they were made, and if things went wrong I knew the boss would have my back.

Being a manager requires lots of tedious work, knowledge of people and interpersonal behaviours, and needs to be continually refreshed. A love of numbers helps especially given the amount of time spent trying to make yet more efficiency savings out of thin air, as does having a vision. I’m equally shocked and horrified by how few planning policy colleagues actually have a view on how the place should develop. For me planning is all about place shaping, how can you write an effective plan if you don’t know what you want the area to become. Its more painting (or rather planning) by numbers than anything else. But pay restraint in local government is pushing people to seek that next promotion whether they want the role or not. Several Team Leaders in my authority have similar workloads to before their ‘promotions’ with the additional responsibility of overseeing half a dozen staff each for an extra £20 a week. How can they or their teams succeed to their best when stretched thinly with no time to nurture, or maintain work quality as the pressure is on to get those apps out the door. Is this adding value for our residents and applicants? Is this even planning or glorified admin?

 

The targets culture whilst speeding things up for a decade or so has been gummed up by the ever increasing set of issues that planning is expected to solve. Nitrate Neutrality is a planning issue, ha pull the other one it’s got bells on. Instead perhaps it’s time for rethink about what planning is for and what is expected of it. A redefined role would go some way in allowing local government to better manage their limited resource more effectively. Regardless of putting more resources into planning teams at a national level we continue to ignore the big issue that has crippled upper tier authorities, spiralling social care costs. Personally I envy colleagues in district authorities, the pressure on budgets is there for them although nothing like in a Unitary. It’s not like a District has to worry about finding an additional £500k mid-year due to a overspend in Social Care. Having contributed to next year’s budget with rather dramatic raises in charges and associated income targets, that perpetual budget shortfall has to be filled one way or another, the current reliance on the same old limited pool of cash cows has no future. Picking on car park income as a cross subsidiary for staff costs can only go so far, at some point the supply/demand curve will shift as we move beyond the price point the market can support. PPAs and pre-apps fees similarly have ceilings to what applicants are willing to pay, for what is a diminishing product. Cutting staff is not an option if we want to have a functioning service as the days of removing fat are long gone its more a question of removing bone(s). We’re not left with many options now, that’s the terrifying thing.

 

So how local government can start to get itself out of this death spiral is to admit mistakes and allow people to step back if the role is not right for them, by taking more risk on future talent and ditch those circular job requirements (how can your staff gain management experience if all the roles require it as an essential criteria?), and start to coach those managers of the future building up their knowledge and skills from across the council as well as from neighbouring councils. Listening to staff and being adaptable to their needs whether that’s about the time in the office vs home working, the workload situation or getting them the tools they need to succeed. Local government can be very penny-pinching in its approach to technology by continuing to bodge poorly performing systems and practices far beyond their useful life. We as planners need to be at the forefront of adopting PlanTech, to free us from the box ticking and allow us to get on with the planning. The councils that are doing this will be the places everyone will want to work, with the laggards struggling even more to recruit than currently.

 

Finally a grown up national conversation about Social Care needs to happen before we see yet more bankruptcies within local government, and I’m hopeful for a revaluation of the 1991 council tax bands (lets add more bands and base the lot on current prices) will start to redress some of the postcode lottery in revenue base thereby allowing some stability after what feels like 15 years of financial chaos. But more realistically multi-year settlements would be a step in the right direction, along with devolution of fiscal powers to raise local income streams as councils can’t be powerhouses in our local economies with both hands tied behind our backs.

Anonymous

Submission 5

I’ve been a planner for over 16yrs now and was one of the contributors last time around.  Last time I stopped shy of identifying the LPA I worked for but this year I don’t care.  It was North Northamptonshire Council – one of two new authorities that have resulted from the politically orchestrated demise of Northamptonshire County Council.  Think Alan Partridge and the mini-Metro sketch and you get the idea.

I ended last year’s piece by saying that I was at the point of considering a career change before I died at my home office desk.  Scroll forward 12 months and I’m thankfully still alive, but perhaps unsurprisingly I have now moved on, and to private practice for the first time.  I had to for my own good and at the risk of this sounding like a ‘me me me’ post, I’ve watched with much sadness as other colleagues have done the same or similar.

The new Northamptonshire unitaries are already haemorrhaging planners to other authorities, private practice, PINS or early retirement and most of them have similar or more experience to myself, so it’s an eye-watering amount of experience and local knowledge to have walk out the door in such a short space of time.

From those I know personally who have left the main reasons seem to be two-fold.  First is the general stress and heavy workloads that LPA planners have to deal with, and it’s clear from reading other submissions from this year and last time that it’s a fairly common theme across the country.

Second seems to be pretty significant dissatisfaction with how the new unitaries are being run.  A few examples relate to working arrangements, disruption from a restructure (West Northants) / lack of progress on a restructure (North Northants), inaction on recruitment, absence of leadership and/or leadership that doesn’t believe staff are overworked.  Don’t just take my word for it – someone who isn’t me went anonymously to the local press about it in the middle of last year:

https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/people/north-northamptonshire-council-worker-says-theyve-been-let-down-by-their-political-leaders-3745017

A lack of staff in the office, and a culture of actively discouraging staff to return to offices certainly didn’t help.  It’s clear from some of the other contributions that being in the office at least some of the time is worth its weight in gold and I’m pleased to hear some good examples of improvement centred around this.

The final straw(s) for me centred around dishonourable behaviour and dishonest directions from senior leadership.  We weren’t allowed to be honest with our customers about resourcing issues and in my specific case, senior management went behind both mine and my line manager’s back to fundamentally alter my role without asking me, and presented me as the new face of a major scheme to the project board (private investors) in a Teams call.  How I held my tongue in that meeting can only be out of shock.

Like others in my position I was pretty much ghosted by Senior Management once my notice went in, with no thanks or well wishes offered by anyone outside of our immediate teams.  Mine were fantastic by the way and I miss them very much.  It leaves a very bitter taste to have been so mistreated, considering how much blood, sweat and tears we all gave to our respective roles over such a long period of time.

After countless resignations in a short space of time the penny finally seems to have dropped though.  Both North and West Northants Councils have gone through, or are going through an independent review of their planning service.  The results from the North make for predictably grim reading, as reported by the local press (good luck finding the actual report on the Council website though):

https://www.northantstelegraph.co.uk/news/politics/council/north-northants-council-planning-review-finds-backlog-of-applications-stressed-staff-and-low-morale-3956971

With both Councils now being understaffed and/or spending a fortune on contract staff to plug gaping holes which are mainly of their own making, I fail to see how the overall aim of the unitaries saving money will be achieved, or how they will attract new talent.  Planners, like ecologists, are not in plentiful supply as it is and I don’t think local government has anything like the appeal it did when I passed my degree. 

Once upon a time there was a certain fear factor of leaving Local Government because of the overall package relative to the private sector, and perhaps ironically the only senior manager who attempted (briefly) to convince me to stay tried to use that fear as the motivator.  As others have mentioned, the playing field is much more level now, so that fear factor just isn’t there any more.

I agree with the comment about ringfencing planning fee income rises for planning services.  How can we ever hope to improve them for everyone if any increase is swallowed up by the general fund?

If you couldn’t tell, right now I do feel quite bitter, and it’s because I’m both hurt and sad at what Local Government Planning, and my former employer have become.  I want nothing more than to see them improve and succeed because I’ve been part of that environment and positive ethos in the past and it is very, VERY rewarding work in that context.  

Almost without exception every planner I’ve worked with cares deeply about what they do, they want to give good customer service and have pride in shaping great places.  In my opinion Government really needs to stop pandering to the vocal Home Counties-type NIMBYs in search of votes, and needs to make a concerted effort to reframe the positive aspects of planning, and to help LPAs to be able to achieve great things we can all be proud of. 

Anonymous

Submission 6

My last contribution was one which I felt tried to achieve balance in reflecting on positives and opportunities and I thoroughly enjoyed expressing those further in the podcast.

Not a huge amount has changed for me since then but I have a bit of a chip on my shoulder, so this is a bit of rant. It might sound bitter and even jealous but it needs to be said.

The last call for evidence and the podcast episodes led to a tidal wave of support from all directions recognising the challenge we face. The hashtag #benicetoplanners even emerged!

But its easy to express support for planners and LPAs when everyone is singing praises and recognising how we suffer, but in reality, are some of our key customers really recognising that?

So I ask, what is the private sector doing for us?

 

I say this as someone engaging daily with more planning consultants than I can count on my fingers and toes. It feels to me like the number of consultancies, housebuilder planners and sole trader consultants has grown significantly in recent years. We are very much aware that that like the significant shift in public employed staff from local government to central government Why local? (tomforth.co.uk) there has been a major shift in planners from LPAs to the Private Sector since the beginning of austerity theplanningprofessionin2019.pdf (rtpi.org.uk).

 

In the darkest days of that period, very few LPAs were employing graduates as Trainee/Assistant Planners, Planning Delivery Grant came to an end (I am a planner thanks to that), part-time masters courses dried up, progression opportunities stalled. The part time masters course I attended between 07-09 had over 20 LPA planners and just 1 private sector planner, it ceased to exist a for a number of years after that. As we left the period of austerity (did we ever leave it or did we just adapt?) junior officer recruitment grew, thanks in a large part to the creation of RTPI apprenticeships. LPAs were able to grow their own again, and boy have we needed to! What we now face is a two-fold crisis in the availability of planners.

1. A massive shortage of experienced planners, largely caused by a vacuum of junior planner recruitment through austerity. The incredibly rare new Assistant Planners of 2008-2016 should’ve been our Senior and Principal Planners and Planning Managers now. I’ve advertised my former position three times in the last 18 months with no success. This is coupled with a lot of retirement in the public sector and a lot of churn, including through every LPA having to do a lot of internal recruitment and promotion to fill the important senior vacancies. We are having to survive by growing our own. That adds massive pressure to every experienced officer, now having to both carry a greater burden of most of the challenging work and help to mentor a larger number of junior officers.
2. I’ve no doubt that if the RTPI re-ran the 2018 study above, the graph included in that would now show the lines crossing and we most likely have more private than public planners. There’s clearly the work to be done and in many (but certainly not all) cases private planners are helpful to LPA planners, by both filtering out the crap we don’t want or need to see and producing better quality schemes by advising their clients well. On the other hand, and I point to small, medium and large consultancies, they have multiplied like rabbits. Every LPA now has a number of consultancies who are ready to take on any work and throw in schemes always doomed to fail, proposals which in the past wouldn’t have been submitted by a planner. These create additional worthless application and appeal work, create a lot of ear ache and have very little public benefit. But the very fact that there are many more consultancies than ever before, many more multinational giant consultancies than ever before cannot be ignored in addressing the causes and effects of poor LPA planner retention and impossible recruitment, leading to struggling services.

The private sector, in my view, used to be the harder and more stressful job and I’ve done a short private stint and the grass wasn’t greener on the other side for me. LPAs used to get stick for officers only working 9-5 and finishing early on a Friday! I don’t think either are seen that way anymore. So many consultancies can now offer the flexi time and working from home benefits, the decent pensions, the same employer funded day-release study, subscriptions paid, fun team nights out and much better pay. I’m a big advocate for the 4 day week and maybe that’s the only option LPA’s can now go for as the unique benefit to keep people and attract them back – I’m closely watching and congratulating South Cambridgeshire DC in trialling that Four-day working week trial - South Cambs District Council (scambs.gov.uk) Most of us are working 6+ day weeks in 5 days anyway!

Recently I’ve been in, or known of, a number of meetings with developers where up to three planning consultants have attended (at times adding very little to the meeting with it being led by architects/designers/engineers/housebuilders). Often a Junior a Senior/Associate and Director attend. Now don’t get me wrong, that’s great to see all levels getting involved, but often in such meetings LPAs can only spare a single planner to attend, often that planner is doing the job of three or four people on the other side. What kind of message does that send? We regularly feel outnumbered and often that is met very empathetically but the private sector needs to consider how it appears to those hard working LPA planners. Those three planning consultants are then ready to follow up swiftly, regularly chase for responses and efficiently ask for the next meeting (and Cc a huge number of others from their team in!) before the LPA officer has had a chance to stop and reflect on the meeting. Again, that’s not to be criticised as good service to their clients, but I am regularly hearing from officers that they resent that and feel that the process of engagement with consultancy planners can feel imbalanced and overpowering. They feel overwhelmed by it all and doubt their abilities to keep up - so a bit of awareness could go a long way.

Going back to the past outpouring of support after the last blog, it was good while it lasted. But things soon went sour. As an active user of Linkedin and Twitter in the planning and development ‘echo chambers’, I’ve seen criticism increase. Some of it well intended, such as the concern about the lack of planners in LPA offices. But who is asking how many planners are in consultancy offices? I’m still seeing a hell of a lot of consultants at home and I know of some who are suffering the same imbalance of office attendance. Just today I’ve seen another regular commentator using one contribution to this very blog to profess all that is wrong with LPA planners, because one contributor is raising their Council’s low office presence. Yes some are poor but I know the majority are striking a good balance of time in and at home. The reality is for many, that we are working every hour we can, so condescending comments from those outside local gov about how Chief Planners and Planning Managers are failing junior officers are unwelcome and unhelpful to our cause and challenges. To me it is an issue to address but it is a minor one compared to the bigger picture of what we face in LPAs. Importantly, being able to work from home, particularly for more remote locations like East Suffolk, has enabled us to recruit some hugely valued officers who would not be with us if more than 1 or 2 days in the office was expected of them.

There are some extremely brilliant, kind and considerate planning consultants out there, the majority are, but there are bad ones and there are awful ones. Planning Consultancy as a collective needs to look at itself in its expanded form and make sure that there are levels of respect recognised amongst them. I’ve seen some truly appalling comments to junior planners in the past year from Planning Consultants (and architects) who should know better. I’m close to anonymously posting them on social media for the world to see. I said it in my last contribution, levels of disrespect and abuse towards hard working and dedicated public servants is the worst its ever been.

So I ask the collective private sector – what can you do for us, how do you ensure that Planning Consultancy maintains a good degree of respect for LPAs and planners? How do you think you might help us with our recruitment challenges? Can you really continue to collect so much planning talent until its only the most loyal senior officers left at LPAs? At the moment I find it really hard to see how we can reverse the continued trend of planners leaving the public sector for the private sector. And please, consultancies, every time you celebrate that you’ve recruited another planner who brings 10 years of LPA experience to your consultancy, just contemplate what is being left and how that is seen (we do see the Planning Magazine articles!! out of context town planning on Twitter: "https://t.co/B6lHOiznaw" / Twitter ). There will come a time when the consultancies can no longer operate effectively if the consents aren’t getting issued or the Local Plans aren’t getting produced.

As Sam has said, although this seems a very LPA focussed call for evidence, it is open to all sectors and I would be genuinely interested to hear how it is for planners of all levels working in consultancies across the country.

 

Ben Woolnough

Submission 7

I am a senior manager running a Planning Service (and other areas), in London. Sam you pose some questions, the first of which is whether things have changed since you first delved into this a year ago. I’d say things are pretty much the same. In fact things got much worse before they came back to the level of no change. That was entirely linked to a steady trickle of staff leaving – mostly to other local authorities. I tried to unpick if there were push factors rather than pull, but all had very good reasons for leaving – moving to another part of the country, a different type of planning job etc. Or perhaps they were just being polite...

Fortunately we were able to recruit to all the vacancies, but until people were in post the existing staff were carrying some massive caseloads and morale definitely went down and stress levels up, for case officers and managers.

So now, I would say things are ‘ok’. Could be better but not as bad as the situation portrayed in some local authorities.

Managing budgets in the current climate is difficult, and planning can’t be immune from putting forward savings. Some industry people cite special circumstances, because planning brings in investment so repays itself. But any service in a council can make a similar argument. It doesn’t wash with the Finance Director. And in a service that spends 90% of its budget on staff, where else is there to go to look for savings? And when you look at the stats – declining application numbers and fee income, I can’t look the CExec in the eye and not agree that, well, we’ll cope.  So, some deliberately kept vacant posts will be deleted. We anticipated and managed that, so there won’t be any compulsory redundancies at least. Fingers still very much crossed for the proposed (we hope) fee increases.

People are welcome to come into the office as much as they want, but are choosing not to, mostly only coming in one or two days a week. But when they do, it is for a team day, or at least a day with their manager/buddy. I am in more so get to see most people a couple of times a month.  But like Catriona and others, do worry about people’s learning and development, particularly the more informal things that happen by osmosis.

My Council has a political and managerial team that is very supportive of most development, which helps, I think, if officers want to find solutions and make good development happen. It can empower them. We are known as a collaborative council; I had a meeting with an applicant the other day where we are looking at ways to make a scheme we all want to happen, more viable. When chatting afterwards he said how different the tone of the conversation would have been in some other Boroughs.

We don’t tend to have tensions with many Councillors. The planning committee take their role seriously and scrutinise applications thoroughly and sensibly. It is very rare that I think they make the ‘wrong’ planning decision.

So I’m hopeful. People still seem to want to work here and are able to develop their careers (most of our senior planners are internally promoted – a result of our ‘invest in your own’ approach). There is a good team culture. People have friends in the office. And sometimes, we even have a laugh. 😊

Anonymous

Submission 8

I’m roughly 3 years post-qualification, and I’ve been working in an LPA for 2 years. My LPA adopted a blanket 100% remote working policy after Covid-19 restrictions were lifted (I joined the LPA during the pandemic via the Public Practice programme, and previously worked in a private sector planning consultancy).

Sadly, I’ve decided to leave my LPA because of its 100% remote working policy. I’m otherwise happy in my work, and believe I would have had lots more to learn and bring to the role.

I appreciate that everyone’s experience of remote working differs, but as an early career planner, I found that working for an LPA with a 100% remote working policy presented some fundamental issues:

Staff loneliness / lack of feeling of belonging – while working at the LPA, I began to suffer with very low motivation in work, which was out-of-character for me. I spent time reflecting on this, and think it was really down to missing workplace camaraderie - especially so during tougher periods, or when approaching challenges in the workplace. I think feeling ‘part of something’ and developing great working relationships (and friendships) with colleagues is, for many, a really meaningful part of working life. It’s a fact that these relationships are harder to cultivate over Teams.

Little to no opportunities for informal learning & networking – I found that a lack of exposure to colleagues outside my immediate team, and in particular lack of exposure to senior colleagues / leadership started to affect my professional development negatively. A great deal of learning is done through ‘osmosis’ in the office: for example, by watching and hearing how a senior colleague handles a complex or difficult situation. This type of informal learning is crucial for gaining an understanding of the correct language, intonation and body language to employ in different situations - things people don’t (and cannot) learn on a training course. I think this has been particularly damaging for young planners in LPAs who have future leadership ambitions. I continue to wonder if there will be significant long-term implications for leadership succession in LPAs as a result of missed learning opportunities here.

I’d established that working from home 100% of the time wasn’t working very well for me, and anecdotally, some other early career colleagues had expressed similar sentiments. So what could I do about it? I came across a final stumbling block:

Early career planners have less influence to change working cultures – and this leaves them with few options but to leave the public sector altogether. Anecdotally, I did push for my team to spend one day a week / fortnight in the office, but this was hard to embed without leadership endorsement. Post-pandemic, some LPAs have got to a stage where many planners have been recruited on a 100% remote-working basis, and visiting the office is impractical – which, at this stage, is not the fault of the remote-preference employee. My sense is that LPA hiring managers and recruitment policies need to step up to make genuine hybrid working work for everyone.

I’m really hopeful that a well-considered and properly piloted hybrid working model in LPAs could address these problems, in spite of the dire state of public sector planning funding. My plea to LPA leadership teams: consider the types of working environment that benefitted your professional development as you built your career, and make every effort to replicate these - your junior planners will thank you.

Anonymous

Submission 9

I’m currently contracting for an LPA in Devon, and whilst they are ridiculously overworked the team is great, the manager is also great. SLT just let her get on with it and they’re actively encouraging staff back in the office, but are hindered a bit by a major refit taking place.

My previous joint LPA in Devon was toxic. I stuck it for just over 2 years simply because they pay a £5k golden welcome…you must repay if you leave in 2 years. I actually quit without another job (as did several others) because I got to the point I didn’t even want to work in planning anymore. I since realise not all LPAs are like this. I will be going self employed in the new financial year though, partly because LPA planning has just got far too complex with endless changes and expecting planners to fix the entire global problems.

SO, my previous place…the responses you’ve had so far are like you read my mind. An ex colleague asked if they were mine! Still mostly working at at home and even after Boris said “back to work” they refused – they allowed a few of us to go in for welfare reasons (but kept it secret almost that it was possible) but even then wanted us to ask permission every time. All the while, SLT kitted themselves out with their own new office in what was pre-covid a totally open planned workplace. So they were in their cosy little office while we all had to stay home.

SLT directly interfered in planning decisions. The CEO ordered the planning manager to make decisions a certain way. He then fed that down to my level (Principal) and every meeting was “if you don’t do that my head’s on the line”…incredibly demotivating and all 3 of us had time off sick. Classic LPA incapable manager. The Leader bullied him and everyone above him – he viewed her as his boss, she was that bad. The CEO and Director told me, after raising a concern with them more than once, “you wont change her” “that’s just how she is”. They then, when the boss had a breakdown, told us principals we needed to do more, but were restructuring out one of our posts – the Director then adopted an incredibly bullish attitude, borderline gaslighted me when I explained how difficult a place it was to work by telling me that no it wasn’t. 

I took on the job being told there was no management responsibility but they suddenly decided there was to be, and refused to re-evaluate the jobs – since learnt that 2 mates were in similar situations in different teams, one got moved up to a new pay scale altogether and the other the same after he was offered a job elsewhere – the old boys club lives on. The goalposts were always changing as we didn't know what actually was the priority....except keeping Members happy.

The final straw was a corporate supermarket project that they gave me (ALDI). It had some merit but was a long way off being approvable – they tried to bully me into approving it, the boss did the “head on the block” line too. So I handed my notice in, they then tried to ask me to stay longer to finish the ALDI but I said Id be refusing it. They gave it to another principal who was told to approve it and to get it to Cttee before its 13 weeks (we all know that’s unheard of!). She rang me close to tears saying she thought it should be refused but she wasn’t allowed. It went to members and they unanimously refused it. I’d told a few the truth about what had happened and they complained to the CEO who instructed the solicitor to “investigate”. The same solicitor that had been party to all the internal bullying over the application. He told members he did a thorough internal investigation and found nothing to evidence my claims, describing me as a disgruntled ex employee casting aspersions against colleagues – he never spoke to me obviously and those he did speak to are too afraid to tell the truth.

The scheme of delegation is dreadful and they changed it to benefit members making it even more difficult – you write your report and right at the end of the process you then had to seek authority to delegate and they had a week to respond. …so you would face a committee call in week 8, assuming you got it done on time. Committees frequently run all day long as a result and the planning member has very little influence over it. Overturns happen in about ¾ of applications, with members being spoon-fed refusal reasons or if approved, delegated to the planning manager to decide on conditions.

In my 2 years there we lost 10 planners – all but 2 started after I did (one has left planning altogether after 17 years with that employer) and some didn’t even stick it for their 6 month probation yet nobody was questioning why. They simply didn’t care and refuse to believe they have a problem. The leader told Executive Committee it was their time to go and they weren't up to making decisions.

New starters got next to no induction or training so often left due to that.

There was a reliance on agency staff some of who were only doing householders, and when not performing, there was a reluctance to tackle it and full time staff were expected to check their work – these councils don't have signing officers, you all issued your own decisions.

Complaints were given absolute top priority over everything even employment applications which were also top priority – a huge amount of time was wasted in meetings talking about complaints also. The manager also passed off this work down to my level and expected it be done as well as all the other duties and applications. However, there was never any feedback or discussion to learn from them.

Sorry to waffle on! To sum up – toxic workplace, incompetent managers, managers not feeling able to make decisions, micromanagement of the planning manager by SLT and the Leader, member bullying of staff at all levels, refusal to address high turnover (exit interviews didn’t happen and you got given an exit form to fill out but only if you asked for it) all compounded by being at home.

Updated.

Can you add developer attitudes. The constant LPA bashing on LinkedIn being one such example. There's never any acceptance that they could do better, and blame everyone but themselves. Increasing aggression towards us planners too. My boss has just been named by one on Linkedin, a personal attack on her which is tantamount to bullying and totally unacceptable. 

Anonymous

Submission 10

We’ve been acting for a leading provider of retirement homes in a Yorkshire authority.

Paid £3k for a pre app - no reply. No meeting, no advice.

Submitted a RM application and paid a 15k fee. Was validated but no officer looked at it during the statutory determination period of 12 weeks.

Had messages now that they have no one to deal with it, but have equally not confirmed any extension.

So it looks like a completely unnecessary appeal on an allocated site that has an outline permission.

Not a good service level.

Anonymous

Submission 11

I would not be surprised if you revealed to me that two of the planning authorities in question are Dorset Council and Bournemouth Christchurch and Poole Council.

I and many agents in the area have been suffering from intolerable delays and I believe it is down to poor management.

We have experienced delays before a case officer is even appointed. We experience refusal to validate applications with requests for unreasonable additional information. After we have eventually had applications validated and even before starting work on applications we get requests for Extensions of Time in which to determine applications. The whole point of that is to get around performance targets set by Government. If we agree to the extensions of time the Start Date for reporting applications not being determined within the statutory procedure is thereby put back and the authority does not appear so bad.

We have been asked to put up site notices which is a statutory duty placed on planning authorities. We are asked to produce photographs of sites and the surrounding area. If we do not agree we are told it may delay determination of the applicant. I am certain that in some cases planning officers are not visiting sites, and relying on Google Earth. I know with over 50 year’s experience that there is no substitute for a site visit when it comes to assessing visual impacts and potential impacts on the living condition of neighbours.

The turnover of planning officers is ridiculous. I have had 3 different case officers in the course of determining one application. I have received positive pre-application advice from one case officer only to find another dealing with my application who goes against the advice I was given. I have had good case officers confiding in me as to how frustrated they are and the low morale in these authorities.

I have had case officers who turn out to be agency staff living as far away as the Midlands and South Wales. How do they carry out site visits? There are relatively few case officers willing to question the advice of consultees, be they external or internal. Others treat advice as though consultees are issuing directions.

 

This has been going on since May 2018 when the old authorities were replaced by two unitary authorities and experienced planning officers were not given posts in the new authorities.

 

M. D. Brown

Submission 12

'Life on the Frontline' focuses on evidence from LPAs. However, to deeply understand the current situation within the planning profession, we need to understand the situation on both sides - in the public and private sectors. Only then - we will be in a position to identify what is not working and what improvements need to be implemented.

I have seen many times that poor performance is blamed on home-working. But how many consultants work from home? I talk to planning consultants in the home setting on daily basis too. 

The industry is well aware of the heavy workloads faced by planners in LPAs. This is a significant issue, which needs to be better recognised by leadership. Junior planners in my authority rarely have less than 80 cases. It most often is around 100-120. For minor and major schemes, it is around 50. It is unsustainable. Do private consultants at the senior level juggle 50 strategic cases at one point in time? I have never seen an article which would compare the workloads of a consultant and planning officer. We need this to happen to understand the complexity of the issue.   

To improve the current situation, we need to lobby the government for planning fees to be ringed-fenced. Increases to planning fees without it means that developers sponsor local governments, but this has no real impact on planning teams, as all the savings go to the 'main pot'. There is no budget to increase capacity within planning teams.

As an individual working in the public sector, I can say that since working from home, I am able to access expertise easier than before to reach my decisions, statutory consultees are often available for quick 'chats', and we organise 'virtual drop-in' sessions to allow discussions. However, shrinking expertise in authorities means that it is harder for planners to get the work done and it is more attractive to move to the private sector, due to opportunities for knowledge sharing. When I started my journey with planning, we had a properly resourced heritage team, urban designer, ecology/tree officer, drainage and archaeology officers. All the above expertise has left the council and the gap has never been bridged. The lack of opportunities for knowledge sharing is the main reason for considering the move to the private sector. 

I absolutely disagree with the assertion that home-working decreases the performance of officers. Since my team started working remotely and we established a team of well-trained officers, there are fewer formal complaints and fewer errors made by officers whilst decision-making. This stands for me as proof of how well-productive my team is when working from home, despite the frightful workload. 

However, I wish to recognise that building new teams and training graduate officers is a true challenge in the current environment and we need to try harder and be better to offer an attractive environment to young planners so that they can grasp planning effectively.​ ​Since Covid 'transformation', we had examples of graduate planners leaving the profession due to mental health issues. The correspondence planners get on a daily basis from applicants is far from professional. I do feel that more face-to-face support and hybrid working is the answer here. 

Despite all the challenges, planning is crucial to shaping places and communities. It finally needs to be given credit, attention and resources it deserves by the central government to improve the current situation. 

Anonymous