The 50 Shades of Planning Blog

Some of you might know that since January 2024 I have been issue a periodic newsletter. I was conscious that I had not issued one for a while, but did not realise until logging in to Mailchimp at the weekend that it had been three months since the last one. Evidently I am struggling to find the time so have decided to call time on that. To be fair, when I had been issuing them of late, they had become little more than summaries of the podcast descriptions so they were not really what I had in mind when I started them. If you are subscribed to this blog and to the 50 Shades podcast then you will not miss anything I publish on these platforms. One of the aims of the newsletter was to bring people together and, as well as sharing news of the blog and podcast, I hoped that it could act as a noticeboard for anybody wanting to share things of possible interest. I think that I can achieve those aims, and perhaps even achieve more, with a WhatsApp Community . The spur was being asked on Lin...

Episode 173 of the podcast is available now via this link or from the usual podcast platforms. This is the fourth of a series of episodes being led by the oldest friend of the podcast, 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. Paul 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 explores the planning system in New Zealand with Stuart Donovan . Stuart is an economist and Senior Fellow with Motu Research, an independent Wellington-based economics and public policy institute. In a conversation rec...

You might have seen that friend of the 50 Shades of Planning podcast Catriona Riddell's latest column for Planning was called 'How planning could work in 2036 (if the new system is allowed to bed down)'. "High speed railways, electricity lines and reservoirs, plus a network of new towns offering plentiful affordable housing, will be enabled in the next decade by the reformed planning system, says our columnist." "2036 is looking bright, thanks to the decisions made in 2026!" was Catriona's final line. What if those decisions are not made though? An alternative take on what we might be dealing with in ten years time was shared by a mutual friend of Catriona and I in a WhatsApp group to which we are both part and the author of that alternative take was agreeable to me sharing it anonymously on here. In 2036 it has been accepted that the plan-led system was a myth. The 30-month plan-making system was a disaster due to pesky things like needing to achie...

Episode 172 of 50  Shades of Planning is available now via this link or from the usual podcast platforms. I was invited to contribute to an event in Leicester back in October last year and also on the panel that evening was Grant Butterworth , who I have known for a long time. Grant kindly invited me down early for a tour of the city, which I readily accepted because Leicester is not a place that I knew well and Grant is always fine company. Anyway, as we were walking around and Grant was pointing out this scheme and that scheme he suggested to me that I really should invite Peter Soulsby on to the podcast, and so I did, Peter accepted, and we met at some studios on the outskirts of Leicester in January. Peter, or rather Sir Peter, has been a politician for over fifty years. He was first elected to Leicester City Council in 1973, but lost his seat in 2003. In between he served as the Leader of the Council twice. Peter was then the MP for Leicester South from 2005 until he resigne...

Episode 171 of 50 Shades of Planning is available now via this link or from the usual podcast platforms. I was invited by Lorenzo Pandolfi of Logic Planning back in February to a seminar that he was hosting jointly with Simone Pagani of GIA Surveyors. They had invited Chris Katkowski of Kings Chambers and Russell Harris of Landmark Chambers to tell the story of the Shard inquiry. I was disappointed not to be able to make it, I recall that I was in Newcastle that afternoon, but one of the benefits of being an amateur podcaster is that if I cannot attend something I can politely enquire as to the possibility of it being recorded. Not just for me, obviously, but for the 50 Shades listenership as well. As it so happens, and perhaps not surprisingly, the event was oversubscribed and so it was agreed that we would turn it into a 50 Shades episode. Over the course of an hour and a quarter or so you will hear two of our most prominent KCs share their recollections of one of the most consequen...

Episode 170 of the podcast is available now via this link or from the usual podcast platforms. "The second (epochal change) is the technology revolution led by developments in artificial intelligence, which will change everything. I mean everything. There is no point in debating whether this technological revolution is a good or bad thing. Just know it is a ‘thing’. In fact, it is ‘the thing’. It will displace jobs, though creating new ones, but no one yet knows the full consequence. Companies and countries will rise or fall on the back of it. It will revolutionise the private sector and should in time revolutionise public services and government. Yet people in most countries, including Britain, have no idea what is about to hit them." Not my words, Readers, but the words of Tony Blair in his recent essay . What is about to hit us? What are the implications of AI in the planning context? What does it mean for what we do now and what we might do in the future? What are the le...