The 50 Shades of Planning Blog

Podcast episode 150 is available now via this link or from Apple and Spotify . Every now and then somebody will ask me where Ripponden is and I tend to reply by saying that if, when driving between Manchester and Leeds, you get to the apocryphal farmhouse in the middle of the motorway and look to the left, you can just about see Ripponden in the middle distance. That section of the M62 is entirely within the Green Belt, which is somewhat remarkable if you can picture it. Indeed, the bench from which I often record my intros and outros to episodes is in the Green Belt, despite Ripponden being a couple of fields away back in one direction and the nearest settlement, Littleborough, being about seven miles in the other direction, with the Blackstone Edge escarpment in between. The fields immediately adjacent to Stafford Towers very definitely do safeguard the countryside from encroachment..., but all the way from Ripponden to Littleborough? All the way from Manchester to Leeds? Why do I ...

In the Coen Brother’s 2000 masterpiece after which this blog is ever-so cleverly and ever-so slightly tenuously named, silver-tongued Ulysses Everett McGill convinces the two convicts to whom he is shackled to escape with him in order to retrieve treasure from the soon-to-be bottom of a reservoir. As it transpired there was no treasure. McGill simply wanted to stop his former wife getting remarried. The only thing that his companions discovered was that McGill’s rhetoric did not match the reality (“I only had two weeks left on my sentence”, said one of them, Pete Hogswallop, upon finding out…). Yesterday’s MHCLG press release, “Pro-growth package unshackling Britain to get building” , is also strong on rhetoric... New measures to slash delays and get Britain building faster through landmark Planning and Infrastructure Bill New powers for Secretary of State could stop councils rejecting planning permissions, tackle blockers in the courts, alongside plans to accelerate reservoirs, windf...

Podcast episode 149 is available now via this link or from Apple  and Spotify . What do you make of this, Readers? It is from an article that I came across on the Nation Cymru website back in July. Wrexham Council will defend its opposition to plans for 600 homes on land south of Holt Road against the advice of planning officers. The application is due to go to appeal on September 29 but at a meeting of Wrexham County Borough Council’s Planning Committee on Monday, senior planning officer Matthew Phillips said no-one within the council’s planning department could represent the council in front of Planning and Environment Decisions Wales inspectors. “I would be in a difficult position defending that as it would go contrary to the Royal Town Planning Institute’s professional charter which says officers shouldn’t try to defend a position contrary to their professional recommendation in an inquiry,” he said. The responses that I received when I shared that with a few people convinced ...