Podcast episode 135: A Brief History of Planning 2010-2024

Episode 135, which is the final episode of 50 Shades of Planning, is available now via this link or from iTunes and Spotify.

Back in March this year friend of the podcast Catriona Riddell gave a lecture at UCL’s Bartlett School of Planning that she called ‘Strategic Planning in England - Where did we go so wrong?’. I could not be there, but Catriona shared her slides on LinkedIn and they read to me almost like a ‘Brief History of Planning 2010-2024’, which I thought a good subject for an episode. Attention was being turned around that time to where a new Government, most likely then a new Labour Government, might take the planning system, so a good time to take stock of and try to learn the lessons of what is now the last Government.

As well as Catriona, who was Director of Planning at the South East England Regional Assembly when the Coalition Government came to power in 2010, I approached another friend of podcast, Steve Quartermain, Chief Planner between 2008 and 2020, who was also keen to be involved. I felt though that we needed a political perspective on things so I also approached Greg Clark.

Greg was appointed Director of Policy for the Conservative Party in 2001 before being elected as MP for Royal Tunbridge Wells in 2005. Greg has held a number of senior Government roles, including, and of most relevance to us, Minister for Decentralisation and Cities within the Department for Communities and Local Government between May 2010 and September 2012 and Secretary of State for CLG between May 2015 and July 2016, and also briefly Secretary of State for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities between July 2022 and September 2022.

Greg, very pleasingly, was also keen to be involved, and the four of us finally got together at Soho Radio Studios in early October.

There were many, many topics of possible conversation in my notes for the recording. We did not actually get to the latter part of that 2010-2024 period, so we did not get to, for example, the Standard Method, the 2020 White Paper, and the whole Theresa Villiers / LURB amendments brouhaha, but that was because we ended up dwelling on, arguably, the big three topics of that 2010-2024 period, which are the revocation of the Regional Strategies, Localism and the NPPF. We did also touch, right at the end of the episode, on permitted development rights.

Comments

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