The 50 Shades of Planning Blog

Episode 163 of the podcast is available now via this link or from the usual podcast platforms. New Towns are back in the news because you will have seen that the Government has announced the first formal step in creating the next generation of them with the launch of a public consultation on the draft New Towns Programme and its environmental implications. The consultation builds on the findings of the New Towns Taskforce report in September 2025 and invites views on how the New Towns Programme will operate, how new towns will be delivered and planned, and the proposed approach to design, placemaking and planning policy. It seeks views on the Government’s offer to locations and a Strategic Environment Assessment report which focuses on local environmental constraints, the cumulative effects of new towns development, and practical methods of mitigation and monitoring. Now then seemed like a good time for me to share a recording made in November 2025 by new friends of the podcast Rebecc...

Podcast episode 162 is available now via this link or from Apple and Spotify . This is the third of a series of episodes being led by the oldest friend of the podcast, Mr Paul Smith. Paul, regular listeners 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. We very seldom look to other countries for inspiration and ideas. He wanted to remedy that and so in this series he is chatting 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. In this episode Paul chats to Jannes Willems and Lilian van Karnenbeek about planning in the Netherlands. Jannes is an assistant professor at the University of Amsterdam and Lilian is a researcher at Utrecht University. In a conversation recorded online ba...

As you might have heard, during podcast episode 159  there was a discussion about the attractiveness of RTPI membership to recent graduates. The point was made that, if the Masters required for chartered status burdens graduates with a year's more debt, and employers, certainly consultancies, do not in a tight labour market require such status, why would they stay at University for that final year or take on two years of part-time study? Then as you might have seen last week, planners at Basildon were subjected to some pretty unpleasant behaviour by some councillors on the planning committee. That led me to wonder how many planners within LPAs are chartered and so might expect to be able to rely on the RTPI for support were they to launch a complaint about this kind of thing. What proportion of planners working in the public and private sectors are actually members of the RTPI and if they aren't why aren't they? If they are, but their employers pay their fees, would they t...

If you are involved they are terrible, but if you are just observing they are terrific. That is how, way back in the day..., I introduced Episode 7 of 50 Shades of Planning. If you are reading a town planning-based blog then the chances are that you will have participated in a planning committee previously, will know immediately what I mean, and will have your own tales to tell. If you are not a planner though or have not been subject to this unique ‘cauldron of human emotion’ (which is what I called Episode 7) then you should watch Wokingham ’s planning committee take over an hour to debate the merits of a proposed communications kiosk in Woodley recently (I only knew about this because I saw somebody last week who had to sit through this discussion whilst waiting for the next application, but you could probably pick any planning committee at any council on any day of the year and see something similar). Yes, of course, not all planning committees are akin to putting the fate of a tr...

Episode 161 of 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link or from Apple and Spotify . I was in Manchester recently and took the opportunity to catch up with friends of the podcast Lisa Tye, Andrew Johnston and Louise Fountain to discuss some of the issues of the day. In a conversation recorded at Reform Radio we talked about the imminent changes to appeal guidance; we talked about the design and placemaking PPG; we talked about affordable housing delivery and the misalignment between Home England’s grant funding and Section 106 requirements; we went back to design and placemaking to talk about Design Review; and towards the end we talked about LPAs charging for invalid applications. The general theme of the discussion though, and hence the title of this episode, was set by a phrase that Lisa used at the start of the discussion and which seems to capture the mood of the moment, certainly as far as the development industry is concerned.

Episode 160 of 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link or Apple and Spotify . Strategic planning, as I said in the introduction to episode 157, is back and that episode, you might recall, looked at what shape it is in right now. What have authorities been able to do whilst awaiting the consolidation of the Planning & Infrastructure Act, the NPPF and the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill? What we did know just a few weeks ago, but we do now, are the new strategic geographies outside of areas governed by a mayor and where some work on Spatial Development Strategies is already underway. So the podcast has looked at where we are now, but what do those tasked with consolidating the Planning & Infrastructure Act, the NPPF and the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, and those producing SDSs, need to know about the last time we were planning strategically given that some time has now passed since the revocation of the Regional Spatial Strat...

Episode 159 of 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link or Apple and Spotify . My initial aim for the 50 Shades of Planning podcast was to replicate James Richardson’s Totally Football show in which he chats to a revolving cast of regular contributors about the issues of the day. Over time these episodes have become interspersed with other more thematic episodes, but I have done that from the outset with some friends in Manchester and then later, as I started spending more time down there, with some friends in The Big Smoke. I mention that because I was in Birmingham last week and recorded the first of this type of ‘catch up’ episode with some of my friends working in the West Midlands. Kathryn Ventham, old friend of the podcast, is a Senior Director at Twenty5 Planning; Myles Wild-Smith, new friend of the podcast, is a Director at Lichfields; and Michelle Simpson-Gallego, also a new friend of the podcast, is a Senior Planning Manager at Terra Strategic. In a conversation...

Episode 158 of 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link or Apple and Spotify . Sometimes episode ideas are put to me, sometimes they come to me in the middle of the night, and sometimes I’ll read something and think to myself, ‘Hmm, that’s interesting…’ Back in October last year I came across a blog by Jack Airey, who is now a Director at Public First but was the Head of Planning at Policy Exchange and subsequently spent a few years inside Number 10 as a Special Advisor to the Prime Minister. The opening line of Jack’s blog was ‘How does bad policy get made?’ and he writes about “the war of attrition that is Whitehall policymaking”; backbench pressure; and the “lack of institutional understanding” within government about how the practical impact of policy proposals. I asked Jack if he would be up for talking about these themes on the pod and, pleasingly, he was, so I thought next about who else it would be interesting to hear from about life inside the Westminster policy-...

Episode 157 of 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link (or from Apple and Spotify ). Strategic planning is back. What do we know? We know that Policy PM1 of the revised draft NPPF anticipates the move towards national coverage of spatial development strategies, as promised by the end of the parliamentary term, and clarifies their role, content, and relationship to other tiers of the development plan. SDSs are intended to be high-level documents focused on genuinely strategic, cross-boundary issues, leaving detailed policy to other plans. We know that the Planning and Infrastructure Act, the second SDS building block, gained royal assent last month and sets out the process by which authorities, be they Mayoral authorities, combined authorities or combined county authorities should prepare SDSs. We know that the third SDS building block, the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill (which has reached the committee stage in the House of Lords), will confirm the str...

Having sought to disengage from the fast-paced, ever-changing, rock and roll world of town and country planning for a fortnight over the festive period, nothing focusses the mind when logging back on than seeing that over 3500 people have registered for the NPPF webinar to which I am contributing next week. Right then… Having been through the published material now myself, and having collated, reviewed and extracted from some of the material published by others what I feel to be the most pertinent points, I thought that as may as well pull everything together into something that is part-repository and part-editorial. I have separated out what might be described as the ‘key changes’, the ‘other changes’, some ‘points of note’ and then some reflections to finish. Some points of order. There is an awful lot to cover in the consultation and this piece will not cover everything. The focus will be my areas of professional interest. This will also likely remain a work in progress during the c...