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...