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-...