The 50 Shades of Planning Blog

In the Coen Brother’s 2000 masterpiece after which this blog is ever-so cleverly named, silver-tongued Ulysses Everett McGill convinces the two convicts to whom he is shackled to escape with him in order to retrieve treasure from the soon-to-be bottom of a reservoir. As it transpired there was no treasure. McGill simply wanted to stop his former wife getting remarried. The only thing that his companions discovered was that McGill’s rhetoric did not match the reality (“I only had two weeks left on my sentence”, said one of them, Pete Hogswallop, upon finding out…). Yesterday’s MHCLG press release, “Pro-growth package unshackling Britain to get building” , is also strong on rhetoric. New measures to slash delays and get Britain building faster through landmark Planning and Infrastructure Bill New powers for Secretary of State could stop councils rejecting planning permissions, tackle blockers in the courts, alongside plans to accelerate reservoirs, windfarms and large housing schemes Tu...

Podcast episode 149 is available now via this link or from Apple  and Spotify . What do you make of this, Readers? It is from an article that I came across on the Nation Cymru website back in July. Wrexham Council will defend its opposition to plans for 600 homes on land south of Holt Road against the advice of planning officers. The application is due to go to appeal on September 29 but at a meeting of Wrexham County Borough Council’s Planning Committee on Monday, senior planning officer Matthew Phillips said no-one within the council’s planning department could represent the council in front of Planning and Environment Decisions Wales inspectors. “I would be in a difficult position defending that as it would go contrary to the Royal Town Planning Institute’s professional charter which says officers shouldn’t try to defend a position contrary to their professional recommendation in an inquiry,” he said. The responses that I received when I shared that with a few people convinced ...

Podcast episode 148 is available now via this link or from iTunes and Spotify . This is the fourteenth episode in my Hitting the High Notes series. If you have not listened to one of these before the basic proposition is that I chat to preeminent figures in the planning and property sectors about the six planning permissions or projects that helped to shape them as professionals. And, so that we can get to know people a little better personally, for every project or stage of their career I also ask my guests for a piece of music that reminds them of that period. Think of it as town planning’s equivalent (rip off...) of Desert Island Discs. Unlike Desert Island Discs though you will not hear any of that music during the episode because using commercially-licensed music without the copyright holders permission or a very expensive PRS licensing agreement could land me in hot water, so, when you have finished listening, you will have to make do with YouTube videos and a Spotify playlist,...

Podcast episode 147 is available now via this link or from iTunes and Spotify . I was in Swinging London recently and took the opportunity to catch up with friends of the podcast Nicola Gooch, Catriona Riddell, Andrew Taylor, Annie Gingell and Iain Thomson. Over the course of an hour or so at Soho Radio Studios we enjoyed a good ol’ fashioned 50 Shades-style ramblechat about a few of hot topics exercising the planning profession at present. We talked about statutory consultees and specifically the need to engage utility providers with the SDS process. We talked about the merits of locally-set application fees. We talked about grant funding for affordable housing; the English Devolution & Community Empowerment Bill, which led on to Assets of Community Value; the use of hotels for the accommodation of asylum seekers; Level 7 Apprenticeships; and we talked about data centres.

Podcast episode 146 is available now via this link or from iTunes and Spotify . This is the first of a new series being led by the oldest friend of the podcast, Mr Paul Smith. Paul, regular listeners to the podcast will know, is the Managing Director at the Strategic Land Group and a Housing Today columnist. Paul put it to me a little while ago that debates about the planning system in England tend, for the most part, to focus solely on the planning system in England, which is right isn’t it? We obsess about whether it is or is not moving towards or further away from whatever it looked like in whenever the good old days were. We very seldom look to other countries for inspiration and ideas. Paul wanted to remedy that and so in this series he is going to chat with planning professionals and academics from a number of countries to find out what works well there, what works less well, and what can we learn. First up. The USA. You will hear in the episode a conversation that Paul record...

Podcast episode 145 is available now via this  link  or from  iTunes  and  Spotify  and it  sees the welcome return of the Hitting The High Notes series. Just before heading off to Spain for a couple of weeks I was in Manchester and took the opportunity to catch up with old friends of the podcast Ian Wray,  Claire Petricca-Riding and David Diggle, and new friends of the podcast Charlotte Leach and Louise Fountain. Over the course of an hour or so we enjoyed a good ol’ fashioned 50 Shades ramblechat. We talked about the increasingly rancorous nature of planning and whether a sense of fractiousness and febrility is driving the rise of Reform as a political force. We also talked about New Towns and Ian’s 'Northern Arc' proposition, and, towards the end, we swapped holiday reading recommendations.

To be statutory or to be non-statutory? That, in relation to National Development Management Policies (NDMPs), is the existential Shakespearean conundrum that the custodians of the planning system appear to have been grappling with of late. Section 93 of The Levelling Up and Regeneration Act (LURA) made provisions, you will recall Dear Reader, to replace s.38(6) of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 as it applies in England such that determination of planning applications should be made in accordance with the development plan and any NDMPs unless material considerations strongly indicate otherwise (thereby strengthening the presumption from its current legal formulation). Further, if there is any conflict between the development plan and a NDMP, the conflict must be resolved in favour of the latter. Matthew Pennycook told MPs in November  that the Government planned to consult on the NDMPs “in the spring of next year”, but spring has turned to summer and in reporting th...

Long-serving (long-suffering?) readers of the blog and listeners to the podcast will recall that back in December 2021 I published the first Life on the Front blog , which informed episode 60 of the podcast a short time afterwards. I revisited the theme with a second blog and podcast a year later. The basis of the initial exercise was, at the prompting of a listener, to explore the LPA staffing crisis and, in 'taking the temperature' of the profession, it certainly struck a nerve. That first blog, as of just now, has been viewed 19,453 times, which is much, much more than my typical wittering. Now seems like a good time to revisit what life is like on planning's front line for a couple of reasons. Firstly, the Government has been in power for a year now and so it is legitimate to ask whether the wave of optimism that immediately followed the election was justified. You might remember that very early on in his ministerial tenure Matthew Pennycook wrote to the RTPI statin...

Podcast episode 144 is available now via this link or from iTunes and Spotify  and it sees the welcome return of the Hitting The High Notes series. If you have not listened to one of these before the basic proposition is that I chat to preeminent figures in the planning and property sectors about the six planning permissions or projects that helped to shape them as professionals. And, so that we can get to know people a little better personally, for every project or stage of their career I also ask my guests for a piece of music that reminds them of that period. Think of it as town planning’s equivalent (nee rip off) of Desert Island Discs. Unlike Desert Island Discs though you will not, I am afraid, hear any of that music during the episode because using commercially-licensed music without the copyright holders permission or a very expensive PRS licensing agreement could land me in hot water, so, when you have finished listening, you will have to make do with You Tube videos an...

Is this fair or is it just a seasoned blogger’s cynical attempt at generating interest in an otherwise fairly dry attempt at summarising the most recent round of planning reform announcements? Who is to say, but this is my attempt at a summary of the build out, site threshold, planning committee and BNG proposals, synthesised with what I humbly contend the key elements of them to be. Just to recap… 25 May (bash the big builders) ‘Get on and Build' Deputy Prime Minister urges housebuilders ​​ ​​​Planning Reform Working Paper: Speeding Up Build Out ​​ - GOV.UK ​ ​Technical consultation on implementing measures to improve Build Out transparency​ - GOV.UK 28 May (support the small ones) Government backs SME builders to get Britain building - GOV.UK Planning Reform Working Paper: Reforming Site Thresholds - GOV.UK Reform of planning committees: technical consultation - GOV.UK Improving the implementation of biodiversity net gain for minor, medium and brownfield develop...