Episode 133 of the podcast is available now via this link or from iTunes and Spotify . I was in Manchester recently (NPPF deadline day actually) and took the opportunity to catch up with friends of the podcast Katie Wray , David Diggle , Greg Dickson , Mark Parkinson and Claire Petricca-Riding at the studios of Reform Radio . Conscious that the podcast has covered the revised NPPF in episodes 128 and 131, we talked about some of the other current hot planning topics. We talked about brownfield passports and why existing tools in the box are not being used already; we talked about the Labour Party Conference, which led on to conversation about a Plan for England; and we talked about what the New Towns Taskforce would need to do to meaningfully advance that agenda... and then we talked a bit more towards to the end about brownfield passports again. We did try not to mention the NPPF, but, as you will hear, were unsuccessful in so doing...
Episode 132 of the podcast is available now via this link or from iTunes and Spotify . "‘The moment has come’: pro-building Labour YIMBYs are set to raise the roof" was the title of this piece in the Observer ahead of the Labour Party Conference. For many of the most ambitious of the new cohort of Labour MPs, this is the fashionable campaign of the moment, not for economic growth but as a social justice movement – and one that many of the new millennials entering parliament hope to stake their careers on. Inside Labour it is not a left-right divide, but some of its champions are prepared for it to mean internal party conflict between those who are radicalised on the housing crisis, and more nervous colleagues in rural or suburban seats won for the first time by Labour who might be tempted to retreat into nimbyism on local issues as a way of trying to keep their seats. The point about first time Labour MPs retreating into NIMBYism is interesting in the context of the propos