Doing more with less

It’s tough running something like PAS. We spend public money and certainly sound like a quango (even if we’re not). Most of the things we do are delivered free at the point of delivery, so we don’t have the most perfect of feedback loops – people buying from elsewhere. Accordingly, we do our best to understand whether or not we’re doing the right thing and one of the methods is to have a steering board.

Top Ten Lists

It’s coming up to that time of year when the music industry starts going into list frenzy.  The Observer music monthly has already trotted out its (patchy IMO) take on the ‘best’ records of the decade and countless magazines and blogs and such will be dishing out their top ten, twenty or 100 records of 2009 mining varied streams of popularism and obscurity.  I thought the old top ten model might be a useful method for looking back on PAS ‘releases’ over the last year.

Maybe you’ve thought about an in-house planning top ten for ’09?  Ranked by s106 contribution? Design/aesthetics? Member/community support? Things that actually got built?

Anyway, here’s my take on a PAS top ten for ’09 – A mix of charting pop singles, debut acts showing promise and classic ol’ favourites rolled around again in time for Christmas:

Diary of a Planning Peer Reviewer – Day 3

We just gave a presentation of our findings to the planning chair, head of service, and others. It went down well. There were a few recommendations that will potentially be tough for some members to swallow. But everyone receiving the presentation felt that the changes would bring about positive outcomes.

Diary of a Planning Peer Reviewer – Day 2

It’s just after 8pm and we’ve just snuck out of planning committee. The second day of the peer review was long but fruitful as we started to get the right evidence to confirm our initial findings and drill down deeper on some of them.  As I said yesterday, I’m learning a lot from the rest of the peer review team.

No stupid questions

We’re trying a bit of an experiment. Be good to have your feedback/comments.

A good number of the comments on our web survey talked about the discussion forums. There was much love for the benefits they bring to the sector, but also some useful suggestions for how we might take them forward. Some of the comments suggested that it would be good to be able to post things anonymously – that part of the reticence people have is linked to not wanting to come across as daft or wanting to reveal which council they’re from.

Without wanting to heavily invest in some tech changes only to have this concept not fly we’re trialling it first by creating a new forum – “There are no stupid questions” – and encouraging people to post anonymously or under a pseudonym.

So don your thinking cap – come up with a funny name – bonus points for the best one – and maybe even a prize – and ask that question you’ve had thats been disturbing your sleep. No one needs to know it was you.

No Stupid questions forum

Register a new anonymous a/c
(you need to use a different email address if you are already registered)

J.

Diary of a Planning Peer Reviewer

Dear diary, planning peer reviews rock!*  This is my first day on a planning peer review. Peer reviews are run on a variety of themes that look closely at how a particular service performs and integrates with the rest of the council (generally speaking). We’re doing a review of a planning service in the south east. The head of the planning service here has worked very hard in preparation for our visit. And I think there are high expectations for what we’ll deliver.

The Jigsaw Puzzle

I have been to a couple of different seminars and workshops lately on the subject of -not surprisingly – spatial planning. Following these seminars I have been contemplating spatial planning in the real world……

  

Copenhagen or not, we have local responsibilities

Expectations for Copenhagen have been a swinging pendulum over the last few weeks.  Obama is going…he’s not going.  We’ll have legally binding agreements…we won’t have legally binding agreements.  In this uncertainty, the LGA held a timely debate earlier this week called Copenhagen: can we turn global talks into action on the ground? The panel was suitably expert to stimulate thought and incite intense frustration (or maybe that’s just me).

Richard Kemp (Deputy Chair, LGA) started off the discussion with a sobering figure on the high percentage of people who still think climate change isn’t caused by humans.  Then Chris Church (Low Carbon Communities Network) told a similarly upsetting anecdote of doing a training session in a district authority where a group of councillors came together and said that the council shouldn’t do anything about climate change as it’s not an issue.  This points to one of the main issues with the role that councils play in the UK’s response to climate change: we need politicians who aren’t afraid to make a tough decision that might only realise benefits after their time in office.  (It would also help if they accepted the causes of climate change in the first place.)

Google results for council planning

Another great post over at the SVN blog from 37signals today on how Google displayed page sections better than sites themselves. The insight paid back immediately. I googled Allerdale as I’m hoping to go and talk to Jill Elliott about the good work they are doing on implementing a development management approach. On Google, planning comes up as the top section:

However, click through to Allerdale’s site and its a whopping 15 or so items down the page. I’m not doing this to pick on Allerdale. Its just the example that ‘happened’. It does make me think it’d be worth all council’s taking a look at what google throws up to try and understand if their own homepage is working? How’s does yours compare?

We can’t really boast. Our homepage for some inexplicable reason is currently not showing up in Google at all! Certainly something to sort out.

Speaking of things to sort out. Thanks also to everyone who completed our website survey. It’s now closed and we’ve compiled the results. We should be publishing a report shortly. There are a number of things we’ve got to get on with to make things better for you. Some of that we can do and will do very soon! Others might take a bit longer… But we certainly appreciate the feedback and honest comments from everyone – look forward to a few tweaks to the site over the coming months and hopefully the imminent return of our homepage to Google!

Evolution or revolution?

I dont read long blogs, so I wont expect you to either.

So here’s an idea – from a spark of creative thinking at a discussion between a bunch of planners – this idea has intrigued and me ever since.

The theory goes like this. Big developers have lots of staff to call on to provide professional advice and talent. They need to sell their houses and are dependent for their success (especially now) on how the market rates their product.
Therefore, what would happen if having given permission for a major housing proposal, the planning authority didn’t impose conditions to regulate the detailed design and arrangement beyond that shown in the application submission and the design and access statement.  Instead, the Council (having given very good development management advice and plenty of well written supplementary planning guidance to help set the expectations) comes along at the completion of the development and gives a rating report evaluating the development as it has been been built out.
The planning system thus would become less regulatory and more an evaluating. Developers would perhaps become more self challenging in order to achieve better ratings.  Buyers would be guided by the evaluation.
Of course this would not work for all developers – in most cases the companies simply dont make use of expertise or won’t resource good design skills relying on off the shelf products and low standard plans.  Maybe ambitious house builders could apply to a local authority to become part of such a scheme and go through an accreditation process so that the Local authoity has confidence in them.

What it would do is shed a load of work on approving details conditions that is both a bugbear to developers and a resource hungry process for LPAs.

Somegardener