The 50 Shades of Planning Blog

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...

Episode 156 of 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link (or from Apple and Spotify ). This is the second of my seasonal offerings that serve as a review of 2025 and I am very pleased to say that one of the most entertaining, informed and erudite planning commentators, if not the most entertaining, informed and erudite of the planning commentators, Zack Simons, kindly bestowed upon me again the honour of announcing his Planoraks Awards on the podcast. I met Zack at Soho Radio Studios and he handed me six golden envelopes which you will hear me open during our conversation. They contain the winners of the following awards: Policy of the Year; Missed Opportunity of the Year; Catastrophe of the Year; Delay of the Year; Stat of the Year; and Consent of the Year. There were, given that we recorded  a few days after the revised draft of the NPPF had been published , a few late entries into some of those categories... If you are reading this you will have read, I am sure, Zac...

Episode 155 of 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link (or from Apple and Spotify ) and , I am pleased to say, it sees the return of the 50 Shades of Planning Festive Christmas Quiz. I got together at Soho Radio Studies last week with friends of podcast Mike Kiely, Catriona Riddell, Annie Gingell, Andrew Taylor, Nicola Gooch, Shelly Rouse, Ben Castell and Gilian Macinnes to review what has been another exciting year in the fast-paced, ever-changing, rock and roll world of town and country planning. Based upon a selection of Planning Magazine’s most-read stories (kindly provided by Richard Garlick), I tested their knowledge of some of the themes that have prevailed most strongly this year. So you will hear me asking them questions about local authority resources, Grey Belt, statutory consultees, the local plans that have run aground, planning committees, snails, and many, many other topics. And when I say many I mean many because this jam-packed, bumper edition of the qui...