The 50 Shades of Planning Blog

"But this is Manchester, we do things differently here", said Anthony H Wilson to Iggy Pop on So it Goes in 1977. It is a quote that companies moving into Manchester like to put on meeting room walls to appear edgy and authentic. It is also a quote that could have been used to announce the news in August 2014 that the ten LPAs in Greater Manchester (GM) had agreed to prepare a joint Development Plan Document (DPD) to set out their approach to housing and employment land for the next 20 years. The Greater Manchester Spatial Development Framework (GMSF). In November 2014 the first GM devolution agreement was agreed and provided for an elected Mayor with responsibility to produce a spatial strategy with the unanimous (an important word) support of his or her Cabinet (the ten leaders).   The GMSF was different because in the post-Regional Spatial Strategy world there were no greater-than-local or sub-regional plans afoot. The GMSF, the development industry hoped, would ...

Garden cities. Who doesn’t like garden cities? Or garden towns? Garden villages maybe? The same thing, but smaller and smaller again. Garden cities are the town planning equivalent of a Sunday evening television programme in which the star of a sitcom from days-gone-by, travelling by something slow and quaint, explores the part of Britain that you holidayed in as a child. Garden cities are comfortable, reassuring and unthreatening, and hark back to a time when public policy was informed by a sense of social justice. Politically, as a result, it should not be possible to lose with garden cities. Free childcare, less bureaucracy for the brave bobbies on the beat, and a new generation of garden towns and villages. Sensible policies for a happier Britain. How could that not poll well in a pre-election focus group? A majority surely beckons. Uh oh! The unelected quangocrats at the Planning Inspectorate are going to find the our local plan unsound if we don’t allocate another 4000...

Placemaking. Who does it, and who do they do it for? Communities. Are they created? If so how, and by whom? These were the weighty questions that came to mind as we watched the second episode of The New Builds Are Coming last week. The first episode was about a draft allocation bomb being dropped upon an unsuspecting rural community. The second episode focused on new communities: from their inception and design to the people who live there. In the ‘frenzy of construction of Oxfordshire’, it was asked, who ‘creates the foundations of community?’ The programme featured two fairly typical urban extensions on the edge of market towns and a smaller scheme on the edge of what planners might call a ‘main rural centre’. Longford Park, Banbury, according to it’s website ( https://www.longford-park.com/ ), is about “far more than new homes, it is a community in the making and a place that people will be proud to call home”. It is being built by Taylor Wimpey, Bovis and Barratt and as...

It is not often that my wife and I watch television together, but last night two of our interests aligned (hers: fly-on-the-wall docu-soaps, mine: concreting over green fields) and so we watched The New Builds Are Coming . (As an early aside, when planning was in the limelight previously the series was called The Planners Are Coming . I wonder why producers feel the need to associate the subject with an impending sense of doom?) There was a discussion about it in the office yesterday morning and I simply expressed a hope that it would feature a plan-led proposal in the hope that this would show the planning system in a better light than a 5YHLS ‘smash and grab’. I also expressed a hope that it would be fair, in that it would portray each actor within the five act play that is the local plan process in the light that they deserve to be. Of those actors, firstly, the developer, or promoter, and the landowner. Neither wanted to engage with the programme, we were told, which could ...

What is to be done about the Green Belt? Most planners, I suspect, have recognised for a while that housing need has become an irresistible force and that hitherto immovable Green Belt boundaries on the edge of most major cities need to start moving. That though has not been and is still not likely to be a feature of many local or national election campaigns because, according to this Ipsos Mori poll from 2015, even though 70% of the public claim to know little or nothing about it, 65% of people know that it should not be built on.   There are though some faint signs that public opinion might be shifting. Another Ipsos Mori poll for campaign group Housing The Powerhouse found net support for Green Belt release across Greater Manchester where this would result in investment for infrastructure and services. Further, in the build-up to the November 2017 Budget a number of newspapers trailed the possibility of Green Belt reform and hinted that the Chancellor was prepared...

This is a piece that I contributed to the RTPI's Blog . Which position is the most precarious? Housing & Planning Minister or football manager? This image, which I came by via @NobleFrancis on Twitter, reveals that Alok Sharma is the fifteenth Housing Minister in twenty years, with the average tenure being just sixteen months. According to this piece the average tenure of a football manager is also sixteen months. An incoming football manager can typically expect to inherit a squad that is bereft of form and confidence. An incoming Planning Minister can typically expect to inherit decisions that were just too complicated and policies that were just too difficult for their predecessors to deal with. Alok Sharma’s in-tray seems particularly full, but helpfully for him a House of Commons Library Briefing Paper on Planning Reform Proposals sets out proposed changes that are still yet to be made. These include (in the Briefing Paper’s order): Section 106...

I first wrote about the Birmingham shortfall in June 2015 . Mike Best of Turley provides the background to it’s emergence through the Birmingham Development Plan (BDP) here , but by June 2015 it was becoming clear that the challenge presented by accommodating some 38,000 homes beyond the city’s administrative boundary and across a housing market area (HMA) represented by 13 other LPAs would not be met by the Duty-to-Cooperate (DtC). The mechanism introduced into the BDP (late in the day as a main modification) is little more than a commitment on behalf of Birmingham’s neighbours to either review already adopted plans or have regard to the shortfall and the DtC in the preparation of new plans. Birmingham, for it’s part, is to review the BDP if the expected rate of progress is not being achieved. What else could have been done about it though? As the BDP Inspector himself put it, “I see no other way of proceeding that would achieve a faster result”, but the optimist in me wonder...