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:

10.  An introduction to local governance www.pas.gov.uk/introlocalgov

A great introduction to the constantly changing raft of things going on in the wider local government sector and how they relate to planning.

9.       Using social networking sites in public consultations: Trafford www.pas.gov.uk/socialnetworking

Nicely short and sharp case study on Trafford’s use of Twitter and Facebook. Something people keep on coming to, months after it was first published.

8.      Local Development Orders www.pas.gov.uk/ldo

Six groups trialling the use of local development orders as part of a more  proportionate approach to planning.

7.      Leadership Academies  www.pas.gov.uk/councillors

It’s been a sold-out run of events this year for leading councillors working in Planning, housing and economic development.  Councillors are critical to delivering successful outcomes through planning and hopefully these events are helping them lead the way.

6.    LDF Project Management Support www.pas.gov.uk/projectmanagement

Support from PAS on applying project management principles to keep the LDS  on track. The most popular of our direct support modules. 

5.     Infrastructure Planning & Delivery support www.pas.gov.uk/infrastructure

Massively in-demand information and support for infrastructure planning. 

4.    Knitting Together: planning for ageing population www.pas.gov.uk/ageingpopulation

A call to action for planners to do more for our ageing population drawing on work already being done by some councils.

3.    Pragmatic Planning event series www.pas.gov.uk/pas/core/page.do?pageId=119894

A new audience for PAS.  Watch this space for more information and resources to support planners who aren’t working at a management level but are crucial to successful delivery.

2.    Managing Excellent Planning Services (MEPS) programme www.pas.gov.uk/meps

I think MEPS (ah) rocks. Was really impressed with the buzz of energy it has created – especially at the Birmingham event. I’m really hopeful that councils will get involved as I think it really shows the way forward. This is also where we made our first stab at video interviews, too.

and drumroll…..

1.   Discussion forums  www.pas.gov.uk/discussions

The forums started to take off this year.  LOTS of people looking and a few super helpful folks getting really involved.  Take the time to post a question or a response.  Help yourself and everyone else who’s in the same lot.

Bonus top 10: favourite records of 2009

These rays of light emerged through the overwhelming fog of old jazz LPs, modular synth buzz, This Heat’s ‘Deceit’ and Scott Walker’s ‘The Drift’: 

10. Elephant Micah – Exiled Magicians (Time-Lag/Third Uncle LP/CD)

9. Kevin Drumm – Imperial Horizon (Hospital Productions CD)

8. Jim O’Rourke – The Visitor (Drag City LP)

7. Bill Wells & Maher Shalal Hash Baz – GOK (Geographic CD)

6. Emeralds – Solar Bridge (Hanson LP)

5. NikaSaya – One Summerheim (Someonegood CD)

4. The Balky Mule – The Length of the Rail (FatCat CD)

3. Broadcast and the Focus Group investigate Witch Cults of the Radio Age (Warp LP)

2. OneohTrix Point Never/Dolphins into the Future – various titles (cassettes)

1. Richard Youngs – Like a Neuron (Dekorder LP)

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.

-I’m on the train back to London as I type this. The train just stopped and we’ve been informed this was ‘due to an idiot on the track’…hmm, are conductors allowed to say that?-

The last day of the review was jam packed. We started off grouping the post-it from the previous days into themes within themes. This is hard because some issues are connected across themes. It’s important to be able to separate them out enough to pinpoint possible solutions. While this was going on we were still talking to important service partners. Some of the information coming in was confirming earlier assumptions but also raising new issues that we couldn’t really continue investigating at this late stage.

The rush to put the presentation together was a little stressful but also exciting. We had a couple of slightly heated discussions of what the main issues were and how we should word them. In the end we agreed enough to get it down on paper just in time. I think this final day was really interesting because it tested all of us. Our short-lived team actually needed the three previous nights of bonding over dinner, drinks and small talk to build a good enough relationship with each other to make some pretty strong statements about another council’s working practices. This final push was a very fulfilling process to go through.

The presentation and following discussion lasted for 2 hours. This was partly due to a very thorough planning chair and his detailed comments and questions. I was happy to hear that some of our points for improvement were warmly received. This council has recently gone through some big management changes and they are on a steep road to improvement. One of our team members had a great tip for this process. He said to the head of service, ‘ask yourself: if I weren’t afraid, what would I do?’. This seems like such a great closing statement after a review like this. They will need to make some comparitively radical changes and the head of service will need to show strong leadership to take his team through this journey.

In any review process I find that my thoughts tend to go toward reflections on my own work practices. The peers on the team also mentioned that they always learn and take ideas back to their authorities. Peer reviews are excellent examples of sector-led improvement. But the important point is that it was a two-way learning experience. All of us on the review team gained considerably from this experience. Ok enough of this sappy stuff. The train has finally started up again and I’m going on holiday tomorrow so I’ll be switching my blackberry and my brain off for the next week. Well, maybe I’ll keep on enough brain power to contemplate what I’m afraid of and perhaps what I would do if I wasn’t afraid.

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. Partly this has to do with focus group facilitation techniques and interview styles. We all broke into laughter when one of the team members was on a telephone interview. He asked ‘If I came down in a spaceship before this change had happened what would I have seen?’ as a probing technique (no pun intended). But actually this was quite useful to get the interviewee to step back a little and give a clear account.

We’ve started to get a really clear view of how external and internal partners view the service and the council as a whole. One leading officer said that the council ‘is the runt of Essex’ (read: we’re not in Essex but the officer has close ties there so presumably this was a slip of the tongue). But despite the underdog characterisation of the council, the planning service is highly regarded by many partners – particularly after some major changes that happened a couple of years ago.

My favourite meeting so far was with the opposition members. One of whom is a dead look alike for Clint Eastwood. Dressed like he just stepped off the set of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, ‘Cllr Eastwood’ was very entertaining to listen to and I thought he raised some very good points later on in planning committee when discussing applications. The committee was a really interesting experience for me. The majority of the public who came couldn’t fit into the council chambers. This is normal for the meetings so the council have made arrangements for them to wait in another room where they could hear the committee. This isn’t ideal. Neither were the visual aids which were projected in a corner far from half the councillors and the public.

On an uplifting note, we had a walk around one of the town centres today. This is an area of considerable deprivation. It was prettier than many of the rural towns where I come from, but there wasn’t much in the way of historical charm or any design to play up the area’s features. The tour was given by a planning policy officer who explained the plans for regeneration which we all agreed were excellent and ambitous. This was impressive and I hope they are able to see these through. Although, there was one minor hang-up: the plans for the main road to a new planned development weren’t sufficient. It wouldn’t be able to handle the traffic and there doesn’t seem to be a proposed response to this.

Tomorrow we’ll draw up a presentation of our findings. There will be good practice to share and some areas for improvement. I’ll share how that presentation goes and any final impressions when I’m sat on the train home.

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.

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 review team is slightly unbalanced from my perspective (it’s me and four very experienced men around my dad’s age) but they’re doing an excellent job at teasing out the issues. We split into pairs to interview officers and members and meet up occasionally in the base room to share notes. The process of linking the messages together is simple. We put key notes from the interviews on post-it notes and group these on flipchart sheets labelled with the six headings of the spatial planning benchmarks.

It’s kind of like playing detective because not everybody is as forthcoming as one might hope. But you can see the telltale signs when people aren’t saying everything they’re thinking. You have to ask the right kind of probing questions to get the real story out. Conversely, some interviewees are very forthcoming and the stuff they come out with can be quite shocking.

Day 1 pros: I’m learning a lot about the different kinds of challenges facing planning services. It has been really encouraging to see enthusiasm in this service for PAS support that they plan to take up. I’m very confident some of our support will get to the heart of some of the big issues we’ve heard about today. And finally, I’m enjoying a post-work lager in front of a wood fire at the hotel (big pro).

Day 1 cons: The day had a rocky start because the peer review room wasn’t properly set up. And the refreshments for the team left a lot to be desired. But nevermind – it’s been a very good day regardless.  Next installment tomorrow (I bet you can’t wait)…

*ok, so I’m slightly prone to hyperbole

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……

  I think like many the jigsaw puzzle of the ‘new’ spatial planning system, as kicked off by the 2004 Act, has taken some time to piece together –  only getting the whole picture when you take into account other guidance and legislation that has come along after the Act. Those that have created this, and some policy wonks, don’t see why it is all so difficult. Maybe they are able to step back and see the whole jigsaw picture. They no doubt put all the pieces together years ago. Although, in my view, this would have been tricky as lots of the pieces were still stuck inside the box.

 How was it for you? – In the thick of it – in development control- you were looking at how to “process” the mountain of applications in 8 or 13 weeks. You looked at the regs (and have tried to understand them) that were relevant to the delivery and actions YOU needed to take to ensure legally robust decisions and good quality development, inside the target time. In Policy it has been – do we have the evidence? How can we get people to respond to our letters? How much consultation, sorry engagement, do we have to do?  We can’t risk spending all that money on the examination to discover we didn’t have the length or depth of evidence on “x”. And your challenges have been  –  How can we get Policy to write some decent policies that give clear direction – and – How can we get Development Control to stop banging on about keeping their control policies –   Enough of this – you know what it ‘was‘ like.

 But now with the whole jigsaw picture is being revealed in front of you and everything is fine, and everyone understands and embraces a spatial planning world……

At one of the authorities I visited recently they seemed to have it all – they had an adopted core strategy, Sustainable Communities Strategy, Local Area Agreement  targets, corporate plan objectives all of which are aligned – fantastic? Well yes, it should be but it wasn’t that straight forward – what about delivering these strategies and objectives, who was responsible for that? Who owned the core strategy? – The planners? The council’s management team? all the members?, the planning committee?,  the Local Strategic Partnership?,  the community?  All of the above – well no. One of their biggest issues was that the core strategy was owned by the policy planners. The Development Control (Management) planners did not know what was expected of them, they didn’t feel that they knew how to implement the core strategy. The corporate team and managers from other services thought that this was something for planners and the Planning Committee to get on with and nothing to do with them.

The Lyons reports (2006/07) when setting out the ‘Place Shaping’ agenda had different ideas. Who does place shaping – all local authority services and other public sector bodies ‘working together’ -‘seeking improved outcomes for places Planners working with other services and local strategic partnerships have a key role to play in place shaping. Planning needs to be in the centre of this. ‘What is place shaping? When you compare definitions of place shaping and spatial planning they are remarkably similar:

“Spatial planning goes beyond traditional land use planning to bring together and integrate policies for the development and use of land with other policies and programmes which influence the nature of places and how they function “  – PPS1

What is the point of creating a strategy if it is not used in a way that will realise the vision and result in outcomes that the community have said that they need and want  - so the next step is delivery.   

Development Management is about: putting spatial planning into action -

managing the process from the first encounter to the development being on the ground and in some cases beyond. – It is about managing outcomes.

Development Management rather than development control seeks to implement the relevant strategies to achieve the desired outcomes.

Now that takes me to another seminar I was at were one of the speakers suggested that Development management was not really a culture change it was really just tweaking Development Control. I beg to differ- I did say to the speaker afterwards that I disagreed with his view. I think he was worried that if he said it was a culture change that he would scare the audience of planners. It is a culture change – but not a scary change – those authorities that have grasped Development Management have found that they have improved the profile of planning inside the authority and with partners; they have enriched the work of the planning officers and improved the outcomes for their communities.

As LPA planners: do you enjoy being the last one to know when the council is promoting a development on your patch?, do you enjoy being the planners that just say no and stand in the way of other services serving the community? No but… it isn’t our fault that they don’t talk to us.

Having thought about it, I have been extremely frustrated over the years about the planners being the last to know what is being proposed. We need to work out how to put ourselves at the centre of the place shaping agenda. We need to get out there and persuade them to talk to us – public services, and developers, need to be building ‘planning’ into their project plans not just in one 8 week chunk but in numerous places but mostly at the earliest possible opportunities, preferably when an idea first comes up and  at early preparation stage. Waiting for pre application, just before the submission of an application, is really too late.    Planners need to welcome the early engagement and be prepared to talk about principles. We need to assess whether proposals achieve the vision – not whether they stick to the rules. It will require planners to go out to the other services and change the practices of those services. It will require planners to convince the management team that they can help to achieve the corporate objectives.

You need to ask yourself did you enter planning to enforce rules or did you enter it to improve the environment and lives of people.  This is a culture change,   away from measuring against a rule to measuring against a vision and a desired outcome for the community.

The spatial planning system, with the other changes in the public sector landscape over the last few years, allows planners an opportunity to positively contribute to achieving desired community outcomes and make more effective use of public money, helping to match-make services that can benefit from co location and synergies. With the Development Management National policy statement – the jigsaw will be complete

To return to the authority I mentioned earlier that appeared to have all the pieces in place –

The authority realised how well they had done in terms of aligning their strategies and objectives and the importance of leading the place making agenda. They have held a workshop where all services worked together to demonstrate the similarity of objectives and the benefits of collaborating, the planning function has been restructured and the policy team and development managers are now working together, and they have set up liaison arrangements with all the services. They saw the importance of all services engaging early with planning, and promoting the need for other partners in the public and the private sector to engage very early with planning to achieve the best outcomes for the community. They recognised the likely spin off benefits as being improvements in efficiency, protecting reputation, and potential synergies between services thereby creating better outcomes for the community.

So that is how the jigsaw fits together –we are all seeking to achieve community objectives and to do this we need to communicate with others. These community objectives should be in the SCS, reflected in the LAA targets, given spatial form in the LDF and ideally be the aim of the corporate objectives delivered through services and development management. The outcomes will be performance managed through Comprehensive Area Assessment. It might depend on what service you belong to which document you will be drawn to first – but they are all relevant to what planners seeks to achieve -  you are part of the jigsaw not all of it.

Now for the puzzleball….

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.)

In my work in PAS I’ve come across more than one case where planners have recommended planning permission for renewable energy developments only to see it turned down by councillors.  The common case is windfarms.  I’ll admit to having serious concerns about windfarms and their impact on the environment.  But, if you don’t want windfarms in your area, then you need to encourage alternatives like Combined Heat and Power, solar, tidal or whatever else is appropriate in your area.  We need local leadership to promote policies and development that are appropriate to local circumstances.  And of course there is the obvious and necessary need to reduce the amount of energy needed and used through transportation, households and non-domestic buildings.  All of this can be done locally through the planning system.

Jeremy Beecham (Vice Chair of the LGA) admitted to being a reluctant convert to nuclear energy in his closing remarks to the LGA debate.  I interpret this to mean that he is aware that the solutions to climate change aren’t perfect, and the technology isn’t perfect.  But we need to make the best decisions that we can with the information and technology that we have now.  Whatever comes out of Copenhagen, local authority councillors will have just as much of a duty to act on climate change and take the necessary decisions to meet the UK’s target as central government politicians.  Their ability or inability to react in time will be just as significant.

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!

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

After a fairly heavy set-up, this is a more relaxed look at some of the visualisations possible when you have benchmarked your data. This, if you like, is the pay-off for the hassle of aligning your data with the standards. Our first one is nicknamed “the factory gate”, and treats the application system as if it were a manufacturing plant.
what is in our system ?
To begin at the beginning, our first visualisation is a nice simple question – “what is going on ?”. I described this picture in terms of the planning department being like a factory. Our traditional measure (the much-beloved national indicator NI157) only recognises planning applications when they are determined (or, using our metaphor, shipped out as completed product from the rear of the factory). Thus, it cannot help you understand how busy you are currently, are likely to be in the future and how well applications are moving through the system.
This, then, helps you as the proprietor of the planning application factory understand what raw materials are coming into your factory, and what status they are at currently.
planning application process
Our first job is to standardise the process. Our standards describe a small set of statuses, and in order it goes:-

• New – it drops onto the mat. Enough time to register it, but not to see if it’s valid, get history, make up file, check fee etc. This should be a temporary status.
• Valid – it’s ready to work on, because it’s all there and ready to use (or …). This should be a temporary status.
• Invalid – it’s not yet ready to work on, because it’s missing something. This should be a temporary status.
• Wdrawn – some applications get withdrawn, for a number of reasons. Permanent status.
• Appeal – some go to appeal, either before determination or after. Permanent status.
• Determined – it’s finished. Permanent status.

(obvious to planners, but for the rest of us the application does not have to go through each status. Most applications go “new” -> “valid” -> “determined”)

qplot(month, data=applist, xlab="months starting Jan 2005", ylab="work", geom="histogram", binwidth=1, facets= Place ~ .,fill=rstatus) +scale_x_continuous(breaks = quarters) +geom_vline(xintercept = dec)

I set out in a previous post most of the set-up to prepare the data. The picture is generated by a single line of code. To break it down a little, it says:-

qplot( # this is the wrapper function
month # we want to group applications by the month in which they were received (as opposed to, for example, their current status)
data = applist # the data comes from the dataframe ‘applist’
xlab = ” .. ” # the label for the x axis
geom = “histogram” # we want to use a histogram (what you might call a bar chart)
binwidth = 1 # histograms can be used to plot continuous distributions, or group discrete ones. You want this graph to plot quarters ? then binwidth = 3
facets = Place ~ . # facets are the name for plotting aspects separately, so you can compare. This plot uses only one axes of faceting. The grammar is “facets = thing1 ~ thing2″, with the wiggly thing (tilde) used as a separator and a dot (.) used as a placeholder if you don’t want to use both axes. Lovely trick – we’ll be using a lot of this in our benchmarking process.
fill = rstatus # this is what turns it from a count of applications received per month to what in excel is called a “stacked bar”. The fill colour of our histogram is dependent on the status of each application.
) # this ends the qplot function
+scale_x_continuous(breaks = quarters) # this provides the nice grey quarters, to help our eyes get a feel for each part of the year (note that ‘quarters’ is a variable that we’ve defined as a set of numbers separated by 3)
+geom_vline(xintercept = dec) # and this provides the vertical black lines to divide out the years. Again, ‘dec’ is a variable that runs 12,24 etc.

So, in return for a little bit of thinking about how to set out the command you get beautiful default colours, aligned axes and pleasing labels. Not to mention the ability to export it straight into any number of formats. Plus – the killer argument for me – you get a script you can run against data that complies with the standard format that does all the processing and generates all the graphs for you. That is just lovely.
why bother ?
Ah yes, the “so what ?” question. This plot allows you to see …

1. How much work is coming into your factory. The overall height isn’t perfect (the genuine amount of work a given number of applications represents is dictated in part by the application mix) but it’s a start. The amount of work coming in now will lead to peaks / troughs in work all the way through the system. Go on, it’s more variable than you thought, isn’t it ? But yes, it has got a bit quiet lately …
2. How many applications get withdrawn. This is something worth worrying about – withdrawn apps include those that should never have been made in the first place (because permission is not required) or those that are hopeless. There are things you can do to reduce both these numbers – making life easier for your applicants and staff.
3. How long applications stay in the “new” box. A good validation department should convert “new” applications into “valid” applications that planners can work on. If you study one of the dummy places, you can see that there are new applications that are actually months old.

Alongside these generally good things is the fact that you can re-run the report and see (immediately) whether processes are improving. A good start to our visualisations.