Weeknotes w/c 7 June

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 project 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 the curriculum. Thanks to Paul Frainer for backing my ideas on this and helping get the ball rolling. 

At HAT we had the pleasure of having the whole team physically in the office for most of the week. We can do this with 2m distancing and asking everyone to do a free Covid test twice a week, and we didn't require anyone to return. Some of us will continue to split our time between home and office, but the different energy and pace we can have by being in the same space was a really welcome change. Although I can see how the massive increase in Zoom/Teams calls is going to be pretty annoying for those not on the call, so I've bought myself a new noise-cancelling headset...

We're working hard in getting Jaywick Works through to a tender package, 'at risk' of planning consent due to the timescales demands of our major funder. It's all systems go as I take charge of negotiating the planning queries coming in, while Tom and Matt attack detailing and coordination with the design team. A fruitful design team meeting - the other consultants on Zoom, our team in the room - made me feel that it will all be possible. But there's an awful lot to get done.

Helena has gotten our project at St Nicholas Square out to tender as well now, although there are still a number of bits and pieces that we continue to work on. One of the really tricky bits is tying up the lighting on the scheme - between what is required to meet statutory standards for the adopted highways areas, and the rest of the different land ownerships. The space should feel like one space but beneath the surface (literally) things are complicated. 

Who is the 'community' and what is in the best interests? A truly fascinating debacle has been unfolding in the small village of Wilburton, pitting a Community Land Trust - which, you might think, would be supported by the community - against many, perhaps a majority, of the villagers. Through a series of polls and votes, the Parish Council has now narrowly lost the confidence of the villagers, by backing the CLT's proposals for 115 new homes, although a poll by the CLT itself found 75% of respondents opposed the scheme. But the turnout in the no confidence vote was only 30% and while the CLT's survey wasn't conducted with the rigour of a formal voting process, at best it only garnered responses from about 50% of adult residents.

So what about all those non-voters? What do they think about a scheme that - after all - would provide affordable homes in perpetuity, run and managed by a charity where any community member can have voting rights on payment of a nominal £1? There's a lot of politics involved with the debacle - links to the former regional Mayor and other stuff - which I'm in no position to comment on. It could be NIMBYs getting out the vote, and a failure to mobilise those for whom the homes would really be of benefit. But it's a sorry tale and well worth reading about, as a cautionary to how 'community' is very hard to define.

Interesting reading on the loss of daylight to existing homes - in high-density inner London, but there are also similar issues arising in lower-density areas. On a current scheme in our office, we are juggling this trade-off - how to make best use of land on an awkward site, to create new council rent homes which are much in need, while respecting the amenity of the homes around the site. These were also once council homes although mostly now purchased through Right to Buy - and have enjoyed uninterrupted daylight since they were built, at what is now an absurdly low density for a very well-connected part of the city. If we weren't to reduce their daylight, we could only build more two-storey homes, which feels crazy for the location. We're doing our best to get a reasonable balance and I genuinely don't think we're anywhere near the level of harm in the schemes quoted in the article - we would walk off the job if that was the direction the client were pushing - but undeniably there will be impacts. The greater good?