Long-serving (long-suffering?) readers of the 50 Shades blog and listeners to the 50 Shades podcast will recall that back in December 2021 I published the first Life on the Front blog, which informed episode 60 of the podcast a short time afterwards. I revisited the theme with a second blog and podcast a year later.
The basis of the initial exercise was, at the prompting of a listener, to explore the LPA staffing crisis and, in 'taking the temperature' of the profession, it certainly struck a nerve. That first blog, as of just now, has been viewed 29,775 times, which is much, much more than my usual wittering. The second blog has been viewed 4,141 times as of just now.
I did try to revisit the subject with a third blog in July last year, but that got a lot less traction.
50 Shades of Planning is though by planners and for planners and it has been suggested to me that there is an appetite out there to revisit the topic, which I am more than happy to do.
So, what is life like right now on planning's front line?
Are you the head of a directorate still having to make budget cuts despite the promise of locally-set fees and full cost recovery? Are you carrying vacant posts and cannot fill them? Are you drowning under a barrage of AI-based FOI requests from objectors and PropTech companies?
Are you a senior officer toying with an agency staff contract because, with local government reorganisation looming, you might as well earn more money for the same work whilst there is work?
Are you a junior officer who would really like to present applications to the planning committee but are too intimidated by certain councillors to try?
On the other side of the fence, are you a junior consultant or land manager grappling with how to amend an application post-submission in the face of a request to withdraw and pay for another pre-app?
Are you a senior land director worried about what the slow down in sales means for your team, or a planning director worried about what next year's fee forecast means for yours?
On the other side of the coin, you might be leaping out of the bed in the morning and skipping in to the office (if you go to an office...) at the minute. If so do please share why as well. I am very conscious that Life on the Front Line needs to highlight the good as well as the bad. I know planning is brilliant, you know planning brilliant, but not everybody does so let us also celebrate what needs celebrating whilst shining a light on what needs not.
Perhaps think of it in this way. Regardless of what you do and who you do it for, if you work in planning and if you were to write to the Housing & Planning Minister, the Chief Planner or the Chief Executive of the RTPI what would you want to tell them? What should they keep doing? What should they start doing? What should they stop doing? You are, of course, perfectly at liberty to write to them now yourselves, but you might not necessarily want to put your name to what you would really like to say so write to me (samstafford@hotmail.com) with what you really want to say and I will cut and paste everything that you send me apart from your name and add all of the submissions that I receive to this blog, which will become a rolling, real-time compendium of the issues, good and bad, that are shaping the profession right now.
Three final things. Firstly, if you do not want your submission to be anonymised and are happy for your name to be attached to it, please let me know. Secondly, if you would like to be involved in a Life on the Front podcast recording if I do put another together, please also let me know. Thirdly, please share this invitation to get involved as widely as you can.
To kick things off I will share an email that I received in response to a LinkedIn poll I circulated earlier this year.
One of the most common topics of conversation at UKREiiF was the need for statutory chief planners and one of the justifications for making the case for such (alongside the implications of more authorities being in no overall control and the nascent national scheme of delegation) was that the status of such a role would be worth working towards. To test that hypothesis in a crudely simple way I asked:
For those that are contemplating leaving a LPA (or have left): were there a statutory chief planner role to work towards would you stay?
- Yes - 34%
- Maybe - 14%
- No - 53%
The poll attracted 80 responses as well as the email below.
Thanks, Everybody.
Submission 1
I work as a junior manager in a team. I have 20 years of experience. Upon promotion last year I had to go through a fight to get any pay rise over what I was doing as 'Principal Planning Officer'. It is in the £55k to £60k pay bracket so high-rate tax is an issue, also pension contributions rise from 6.8% to 8.5% under LGPS. Many of my competent colleagues come forward quickly after graduation and get to the same pay bracket in their late 20's, without management responsibilities. That is fine for them. But I am in my mid 40's. There is no pay progression in reality to management, it is peanuts in the scheme of things. And this is a London LPA. It is one of the better paid ones.
There are many things that I could get annoyed about but choose not to. Like my younger colleagues continue to complain about pay, and about management, whilst benefitting in many cases by living in 'affordable housing', IE new build flats in London at 60% rent under DMR schemes. All this just has to be suffered in a kind of Stoic manner.
What I can of course do, and have done in the past, is switch to a contract role. No management, just pure major/strategic casework. £70 per hour is realistic. That is around 100k per year. 44 weeks working. No management. The option is always there. I get at least 10 messages a day.
Why persevere? One reason is that you can have a lot more influence and job satisfaction. But essentially it is pretty obvious to me that many of the issues in the sector could be dealt with by getting more competent people to become Managers in LPA's. In reality that requires increasing the pay by around 20%.
Anonymous
I have a great team of enthusiastic individuals who are keen to do a great job and I'm incredibly lucky to be their manager.
What us however very apparent is that we are still being hampered by a number of things.
- Our main planning system is clunky and there must be a better way for everyone engaged in this system to have a programme that works for everyone. This includes applicants, agents and the general public. It must do better for planning officers and with improvements it will make no end of difference to the process.
- We MUST look at suitable indicators to measure performance of councils. 13 and 8 week targets are dead. We need cleverer metrics based on actual things that show how the service is doing. The time for consultees coming back, the time to collate the data from these consultations etc. I think with a better system this can be done a lot easier.
- Each council needs a programme officer who can assess where the knowledge gaps are in each council to make the best decisions possible. It needs to have the teeth to intervene if there are councils are really struggling.
- Fees for planning need to be for planning improvements as standard. This means we all know how much councils can allocate to improvements. It also needs to be able to rationalise pay for staff and give them bonuses for when they do well. True incentives based on the complexity of planning, etc.
Glen Baker-Adams
Development Services and Enforcement Manager, Blaby District Council
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