Weeknotes w/c 25 October 2021

One of the things about localgov work is that it doesn't often fit neatly with family life. There are limited windows in the year between elections to get stuff through member scrutiny and out to consultation between election cycles. Having spent all August getting a massive amount of planning work into Council scrutiny at the start of September, I've now spent all of half term preparing to launch a big Local Plan consultation on 1 November. Luckily our half term plans were blown off course anyway by a child catching Covid, so it was lockdown at home for one half of the family, while the other half went jollying up to Scotland 🤔

Last weekend I spent a lovely evening talking to with my old friend Ambrose Gillick for his podcast A is for Architecture. I talked about planning and participation and what it is I try to do. Then this week has been a flurry of logistical preparations, writing briefing notes about everything under the sun while overseeing printing, digital plan finetuning, debugging interactive maps, writing social media posts and reviewing risk assessments for event venues. The legwork of participation to be sure.

I wrote a piece among all this, for the Cambridge Independent, which was a rallying call for the value and importance of responding to a consultation like that we are about to launch. (It's not online yet as the print edition is still on sale.) Yes, it's a relatively formal and conventional consultation, albeit with some really great content, and a lot of work put into making it easy to comment and reaching people of all sorts in all parts of our communities. It will generate probably a million words of responses, and the team read and carefully consider each one. This is the last consultation I'm running for the Greater Cambridge Shared Planning Service, as I've decided I need a change of scene at the end of the year...and I hope it will be a good one. And if you want someone to come and run a great consultation with your team in 2022, just give me a bell 😉

I've also been really getting into the new family ebike. With my bright yellow windcheater, my bright orange panniers, sensible helmet and the Ribble, I definitely feel no longer youthful, but it is all extremely practical! The 7 miles from home to work don't feel like a slog, even in the dark with 3 stone of laptops and root vegetables hanging off the sides. But as we try to do our bit to reduce our car miles, the Chancellor does the opposite with freezing fuel duty and cutting short-haul flight tax. Of all the things we really don't need to do...encouraging domestic flights has got to be right up there. How about cutting train fares? Subsidising ebikes and EVs for those on lower incomes?

Lastly I really enjoyed reading a Friday blog from Alasdair Rae, GIS supremo, on food outlets, fried chicken and much more. Well worth a read.