bottom drawer

I've been thinking a lot (even more than usual) about the issue of engagement and consultation in planning, and the barriers that exist to making it meaningful. Fundamentally we have a real issue in how planning, as a system, is set up. I have a much longer half -finished piece on this, but basically it operates on a judicial basis, yet with a statutory requirement for consultation.  It's a bit like saying saying that the general public should be consulted on a complex legal case before it goes to court.  In this system, consultation is not a decision-making process and, unless your comment/representation is backed up with well-researched evidence, it is likely to be outweighed by the huge amount of professionally produced evidence commissioned by local authorities themselves and by major development interests who submit reams of paperwork. Yet government - in their Planning White Paper - talk about foregrounding consultation. What is this really going to achieve, other than m...

Another super busy week. (This might be a theme.)  I had a great chat with Claire from the Planning Inspectorate about her new project investigating how AI might be useful to planners in analysing consultation comments,  or representations, as they are known in the regulatory jargon. I say a great chat, but I fear it was somewhat one-sided...Claire made the mistake of letting on that I wa the first local authority planner she'd spoken to, so I gave her chapter and verse on the challenges planners face in collating, analysing and presenting reps to PINS. If we could just send them a secure database link rather than endless PDFs, that would be a great start 😉. I've got a half finished post about this in more detail so I'll stop there. I sent out a  survey  this week to ask our cultural and digital community in Colchester what the way forward should be for the Creative Colchester Partnership, for which I am the new Chair. Already lots of great responses in, and if you ...

This week had the pleasure of two face to face meetings in one day! On Tuesday I went to Beth Chatto Gardens to meet director Julia Boulton, Beth's granddaughter,  and talk all things Jaywick Sands. We are collaborating with BCG's designer Lucy Redman on the design of the community garden as part of the Jaywick Works project, and we really want to expand what we can do with the project to involve the community as far as possible - with designing, training, creating, building, planting and caring for the garden. Obviously there's no money in the project budget for all this, but Julia is brilliant - can-do, down to earth, up for anything...so we are cooking up a plan. One of the benefits of the 'new' ways of working is that you can literally work from anywhere, so before my meeting with Julia, I sat in the shade of a tree in the garden, got out my laptop, and joined a teams call with Frances Brown of Nightingale and my colleague Paul Frainer to talk about local pla...

Giving the currently fashionable weeknotes format a try. I spend my week in a messy mashup between my two roles - as director of my own practice, and as Engagement and Communications Lead for the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service. This week, at GCSP,  I said goodbye to a fabulous colleague who I hired during the first lockdown and who I've only met once in person. Jo has been amazing, and it's such a shame that, b/c localgov, we couldn't turn her agency contract into a proper job. I'm now starting to try to find her replacement as the job she did is basically core to our service. We also won a few awards at the Planning Awards, which is a massive morale boost for the whole service. Sadly we didn't win the engagement award, but we lost to a truly outstanding projec t which sets a standard we are nowhere near yet. But we are trying- and I had a great conversation with a local secondary school about how we can work with their students to bring planning into th...

This week I started reading Elizabeth Jane Howard's The Long View. I am in awe of it already - a deep, gorgeously written, beautifully uncomfortable and smart exploration of a dysfunctional long-term relationship. At the start, the protagonist is 43 and feels irretrievably old; as the book goes on, time moves backwards, so we find she felt old at 37; and that's as far as I've got so far. She is as beautiful and discomforting as the book.  At 43, she has a daughter aged 19 and a son aged 25 or so, on the brink of marriage. As a just-turned-40 myself, I read this and imagine myself meeting a future son- or daughter-in-law, although our kids are still just into secondary school. I often feel barely out of being teenage myself, but I have become increasingly aware that, of course, the world doesn't see me like that. I'm not sure that the term 'matron' feels very 2021, but that's how I'm seen, most of the time. I have kids, some middle-aged spread, no-non...

So, it's been a long time. 13 year, two children, many projects, one pandemic (ongoing). But on and off, over the last year, I've been thinking how much I miss the regular practice of blogging - of writing, pretty much unedited, about what interests, preoccupied, frustrates or pleases me on a more-or-less daily basis. Plus, I have to say, I am needled (in a good way) by my great friends  Ben  and  Anoushka  who are brilliant bloggers, plus the new-ish fashion for weeknotes and Medium, but as I've got far more old school blog domains registered than I should, I thought I'd see what happens if I resurrect writing here. I have started to re-read my old blogposts here too, in case there are things that have aged as badly as a cricketer's tweets. So far I have decided to leave them as they are, but I haven't read them all, so if you find something that excruciating, or worse, please forgive. Blog mark 2, here goes...