A lot can happen in a year.
The new Government has committed to 1.5 million new homes over the parliament and a plethora of revisions to policy or reforms to the planning system have arrived or are on their way.
In planning for strategic scale sites, such as new settlements or sustainable urban extensions, we have seen interesting proposals put forward in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill to tackle ‘hope value’ in the compulsory purchase process, streamline infrastructure planning and strengthen the development corporation model.
A New Towns Task Force is also busy considering where and how a new generation of developments with over 10,000 homes should or could be built. So far, we have learnt over 100 locations were put forward and about a dozen will be selected (likely to be a mix of free-standing towns and extensions to existing towns and cities). My interest was especially piqued by the interim update and a series of principles based on ‘lessons learned’, including setting locally generated visions, establishing a strategic rationale for site selection, building whole communities and putting a sustainable stewardship model in place form the outset.
Things are looking up. But such change can also cause turbulence for those already trying to progress proposals and projects for strategic growth. It can cause your head to spin.
I was recently told a simple mindfulness technique, when faced with change and anxiety, is to concentrate on your feet being firmly fixed to the ground. One way, as practitioners, we can do this is to reflect on existing experiences and cases - what are the challenges and what works well. From my own experience of working on strategic sites, my overarching advice would be to:
- Front load the process to align the planning with political support, investment and delivery – but keep it proportionate to what most matters at that point in time.
- Deliberately build an iterative process from the start between vision, the evidence gathering and engagement. They must go hand in hand.
- Nurture positive relationships in the project over the long term to enable constructive joint working. This will pay high dividends over time.
- Identify what a successful place should be like, not just what good housing looks like, and work out how this can be implemented.
- Embed principles of design quality and place making from planning framework through the application process and into the delivery stage.
We will be exploring more on this in the next CPD Masterclass - Planning for strategic development sites. We will use different examples and interactive exercises from plan making process through to applications and permissions. Please search for the next available date in our Training Calendar.
