The 50 Shades of Planning Blog

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...