The 50 Shades of Planning Blog

If you have listened to Episode 45 of the 50 Shades of Planning Podcast you will have heard Clive Betts say that... 'In the Netherlands planning is seen as part of the solution. In the UK, too often, planning is seen as part of the problem'. I said in reply that that would look good on a t-shirt so I have made a few and it does! They are available in black or white (in S, M and L sizes) and are £15 if there is a chance that I'll be able to deliver one to you or £20 if you will need it posting. Please email samstafford@hotmail.com if you would like one. Planning might not be black and white, but the 50 Shades t-shirts are...

Prepare the barricades, fellow planners; dig out a shelter at the bottom of your garden (if you are lucky enough to have a garden…); and stock up on tins of non-perishable food. There might be a culture war coming and a good planner always spots trouble before it arrives... Given broader cultural, media and political trends it was perhaps only a matter of time before the built environment was subject to the same us versus them, progressive versus regressive factionalism that mars other aspects of public policy and debate. Twitter, of course, is not representative of public opinion, but it can be representative of the cultural, media and political influencers that are shaping it and I spotted this image on there recently. As far as I could tell it was a Brit that posted it and so it is not one of those unseemly intellectual skirmishes breezily dismissed as something our crazy, madcap cousins on the other side of the Atlantic occupy themselves with. Stereotypes are sometimes funny and so...

A blog! An actual blog! It has been a while because my writing is mostly now preparatory material for podcast episodes, but eminent planning lawyer Simon Ricketts kindly invited me to contribute to a  Clubhouse session this week and having jotted down some thoughts for that I thought that I may as well leverage the content on another digital platform… Simon’s theme this week was both deliberately provocative, ‘Why are planning issues so badly reported in the media?’, and well-timed, given coverage in The Times this week of “ new planning targets forcing councils to build on greenbelt sites ”. Planning is, for all we might hope it to be more publicly-accessible, a technocratic, quasi-judicial process and we have no more right to expect journalists to be instant experts in it than doctors have when reading articles about Covid or immigration lawyers have when reading articles about deportations and so on. It can be striking though, and sometimes disappointing, to see an incons...

In case you have not heard the government is committed to reshaping the planning system to make it accessible, efficient and more predictable. Permitted development (PD) rights, which are kryptonite to the paternalistic planner and cocaine to the free marketeer, have come in from the shadowy fringe to take centre stage in this government’s reshaping process. From September last year a new use class brought together commercial, business and service uses ‘to provide greater flexibility and enable businesses to respond rapidly to changing market demands’. It seemed to me that most commentators agreed that moving between such uses without the need for a planning application was a good thing on the basis perhaps that one of those activities is better than no activity. ‘ Class E’s are good ’ someone who came of age in the ‘90s might say. Hot on it’s heels though came another consultation in December on a proposed new PD right for the change from that new Class E to residential. My sense...

The end, when it came, was fittingly ignominious. The Publication version of the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework (GMSF), which is in the public domain, but will not now be published for public consultation, was to help “transform Greater Manchester (GM) into a top global city”, but Stockport’s councillors must have missed that bit as they presumably skimmed straight to the housing allocations chapter. Stockport’s vote on continuing to progress the conurbation-wide development plan document (DPD) bore less of a resemblance to New York’s City Council and more of a resemblance to Dibley Parish Council. The GMSF states that “the strength and strategic location of Greater Manchester puts it in an ideal place to act as the primary driver for the Northern Powerhouse”, but such lofty rhetoric played second fiddle to members’ concerns about the plan being based on ‘developer wants rather than community need’; it’s reliance on ‘out-dated’ statistics and who’s ward was ‘bearing the brunt of...

How remiss of me! Since I began working in the West Midlands I have been recording an annual collection of reflections on devolution and the Birmingham shortfall. Here we are towards the end of 2020 and I very nearly managed to miss the sixth instalment. If this is the first of these blogs that you have come across feel free to catch up via these links:·  2015 ; 2016 ; 2017 ; 2018 ; and 2019 (a fifth anniversary podcast special). December 2019 was a month that neatly encapsulates the issues at play in the West Midlands. It was last December that Birmingham City Council’s (BCC) Cabinet considered the looming three year anniversary of the adoption of the Birmingham Development Plan (BDP). A review mechanism, readers of past blogs and followers of this whole, sorry farrago will know, was introduced late in the day into the BDP whereby BCC would review the Plan within three years of adoption (10 January 2017) if the expected rate of progress on distributing a 37,900 home shortfall w...

Fixture release day is the footballing highlight of the summer. Even those fans for whom relegation was the paltry reward for another season of dedicated service will at least have something new to look forward to. It might not be a cash-laden consortium of far east owners, or a precocious young coach, or a new star striker, but there will at least be a couple of different teams on the fixture list. If your team finished mid-table in one of the middle divisions then you will have a few new faces. They might include a Goliath on their way down, a David on their way up, or perhaps just a once familiar foe that has spent a few seasons in either the sun or the shadows. From the moment the preceding season has finished and matters of promotion and relegation have been settled I will have had my eye on new grounds to visit. I put every game in my work calendar and then surreptitiously slip the games that I fancy during the first half of the season onto the kitchen calendar. I repeat this e...