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...