Posts

To grasp the nettle: How to deal with housing, climate and levelling up (Cover story for The Planner January 2023)

-
Image
December 2022. The levelling up and regeneration bill is merrily making its way through the report stage to a soundtrack of supermarket Christmas tunes. It’s a special time when MPs can gather round, suggesting amendments. Puncturing the festive legislative atmosphere, a group of Conservative MPs tabled a mutinous amendment seeking prohibition of mandatory housing targets and the abolition of five-year land supply. Surely, you cried, so few people couldn’t have such an impact? But they could. When I reached the fifth door of my advent calendar, Michael Gove capitulated. Although targets were only ever a starting point, it represented a shift. There is broad consensus this will reduce housing delivery and undermine plan-making: Merry Christmas. A crisis If you possess a functioning memory you may recall a government promise to build 300,000 houses a year, reaffirmed by Gove as recently as October. Many argue we don’t need that many. I believe we do. If anything, housing needs are undere...
Post a Comment
Read more

Take the party politics out of planning and housing policies

-
Image
Planning, housing and infrastructure have never been more salient political issues. For good reason. The UK may have economically recovered from Covid earlier than thought , but as a country we are not well. We are ailed by the significant and competing challenges of affordability, productivity and climate breakdown. Where Labour might once have prescribed public spending, a challenging fiscal picture has led them to join the Conservatives in calling for growth . Planning represents a potential route to administer that treatment and manage its side effects, but it is not currently fulfilling its potential. We see evidence of this in national news. We are struggling to deliver enough homes in the right parts of the country at prices people can afford. Capacity issues across waterway, sewer and electricity grid systems are constraining development. Large infrastructure projects are expensive and complex; HS2 is battling to connect into London , let alone the rest of the country. Whilst ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Better Places? Into the Matrix

-
Image
Policy Exchange's " A Matrix for Measuring & Delivering Placemaking Quality " was published last week with an endorsement from none other than Michael Gove. As Simon Ricketts pointed out in his excellent blog , this means we should probably give it some consideration.  I've therefore repurposed some thoughts on the matter: Conflicts of interest  I'll be honest,  I'm not a fully impartial commentator: 1. I work for an organisation has an evidence based framework setting out the key ingredients (physical and non-physical) that help support quality of life at a neighbourhood level. 2. I helped develop and write the National Model Design Code with colleagues and national government at my previous job.  Let's get into it Ok, that being said, here are my thoughts on the matrix: 1. Lack of clarity on process/use Intended scorer and process I can’t get a clear sense of who the intended “scorer” is (developer “marking their own work” or LPA) and how it is to be...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Equitable Approach to Housing Design Quality

-
Image
It’s an uncharacteristically warm February evening in lockdown. The Manchester sky, which for most of the day has been a shocking shade of (whisper it!) blue, is cooling down to a mellow lilac, and more familiar banks of cloud are gathering on the horizon. I am happily laboring under the misapprehension that spring has arrived and wandering around a housing estate in Moss Side. This is one of many meanderings from the centre point of my flat, tracking an uneven radius that increases in relation to my restlessness. These walks have been a rare joy of lockdown. They make me feel grateful for my interest in urban design. What do others do when all else fails to entertain? At least we can always go outside and look at buildings. There are downsides of course – this time I got a blister; once some children on bikes jeered at me and I occasionally get odd looks, but in the main it’s a diverting and educational pastime. This particular evening, I was matching up components of the residential ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Community led Strategic Planning: If Not Your Back Yard, Then Where?

-
Image
Like many within the industry I watched the 21st June Parliamentary debate on planning with a mixture of excitement (“Ooo look at planning right there at the top of the political agenda!”) and horror (“but, but, the bill hasn’t been written yet!”, “what even is a Developer’s Charter!?”)  Although the debate expanded to cover failures of the current system, the housing crisis, land banking, infrastructure, green space and the environment, the starting point was an issue of local democracy. Namely, the fear that a Planning Bill could remove the rights of residents to comment on (let’s be honest, object to) individual applications.  The white paper proposes a simplification of Local Plans to focus on identifying land under three categories: growth, renewal and protected. In “growth” areas outline approval would automatically be secured. In such a system, respondents could comment on the details of development, but any objections to principle would be shifted forward in the proces...
Post a Comment
Read more

Planning Top Trumps: UK vs The Netherlands

-
Image
  “In the Netherlands, planning is seen as part of the solution, in the UK, planning is seen as part of the problem” So said Clive Betts MP on the most recent edition of the 50 Shades of Planning Podcast . Clive is Chair of the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee – a cross party scrutiny group that recently published an intelligent and even-handed analysis of the Planning White Paper . This comparison with the Netherlands comes up often, especially in the urban design circles that I move in. It exists in our minds as a planning utopia; a common destination for best practice field trips, much cited in case studies and frequently admired in industry press coverage. In practical terms though, how is it actually different? What does being seen as “part of the solution” actually look like in practice? I think it’s time to play a little game of Top Trumps.   Resourcing An easy comparison. The 2019 RTPI Report “ Resourcing Public Planning ” highlighted that there are...
Post a Comment
Read more

Safe Spaces?

-
Image
“A blog post once a month” she said. “That’s achievable” she said. Yet here we are, it’s April Fool’s Day, and there hasn’t been a blog post since February. This is not for a lack of ideas, more a lack of time. In fact it’s probably a deadly combination of too many ideas and too little time, resulting in a handful of hastily composed Twitter threads and….zero blog posts. Anyway, points should be awarded for not skipping March completely and waiting until mid-April to write anything else. This is a postponed March post, and I will write another for April. I will. I will. I’m also trying to be less fussy about planning the content/structure – it’s a blog post after all, not a book chapter.  For most of March Sarah Everard was at the forefront of my mind. What she symbolised I guess, rather than the woman herself, who I know so little about. I talked with my partner about our experience of being out in the streets, moving through spaces. For me this means always being on alert, always...
Post a Comment
Read more