Don’t panic! You are never alone

Picture taken in ‘Young Ones’ student house in 1986 – but which one is Pilgrim Pete?

One of the joys of working in the PAS team is that I can spend my days talking to like minded Planners across the country, find out what they are up to and tell them about what others are doing well. Many Planners feel quite isolated at the moment and are reassured to know that they have the same pressures, worries and questions as others. I also come across some brilliant best practice so can get Planners to learn from each other and avoid ‘reinventing the wheel’ To save you all time here are my top 10 issues that Development Management teams are struggling with at the moment and the top 10 best ideas I have heard over the last year.

Top 10 issues (in no particular order)

1. The number of householder applications have (excuse the pun) gone through the roof and you are all struggling with the shear volume. Reasons seem to be due to the Covid effect of more home working and cost of moving.
2. Planners are in very short supply particularly experienced Planners who can manage those tricky Majors. The best case officers are being poached by the applicants!
3. Extension of times are covering up a whole multitude of sins and Heads of Planning are grappling with the need to be honest about performance versus ‘playing the game’ to avoid the threat of designation
4. Some Councils are getting themselves in a real pickle over validation and have a philosophical dilemma whether to treat it as a administrative process or a key part of providing a customer focused service
5. Desperate shortages of staff lead to desperate times and pre application normally is the area that suffers most. However when Councils stop pre applications they end up losing a vital discretionary income source and have poorer application submissions
6. Another consequence of staff shortages is for the remaining staff to stop answering emails and phone calls due to pressures of work. However this normally just ends up with more complaints and grief from councillors, agents and the public
7. There appears to be a higher expectation of Planners from the public in terms of both enforcement and determining planning applications. The world of work has changed and more people work from home so are more conscious of their local area. This means they have more time to nag the Planning Department.
8. Social media is targeting Planning Officers and councillors more and more in a negative way. People can view Planning Committees via a webcast and can more easily pick over every word uttered by decision makers and their officers.
9. The fear of challenge is leading officers to write ever more complex and long winded reports just at the time when time is at a premium. You need to be careful if you expect an appeal, legal challenge or complaint but most officer reports end up in the (virtual) back of the filing cabinet neglected and unread. Why are you spending so much time on the unread reports?
10. Some Councils get tied up in knots with their ‘Heath Robinson’ approach to IT. This sometimes results in very few people actually understanding how the IT system works and to a ‘single point of failure’ scenario. Successful Councils keep things simple and logical with a good backup of officers who understand how things work.

Now here are the Top 10 ideas (again in no particular order). I have purposely focused on the day-to-day ideas that help you run an excellent Development Management service. Others will tell you about the importance of aligning Development Management with the strategic direction of the Council, future proofing your service to respond to the Levelling Up and Regeneration Bill, addressing national policy etc. These are, maybe, the tips that you will not always be told about by others.

1. Pair the Chair of Planning Committee up with an LGA Member Peer as a mentor. It doesn’t matter how experienced the Chair is, the best way to learn is through peer-to-peer support
2. Have a learning through experience process where you learn from every complaint, compliment, appeal decision etc whether it is positive or negative. This is a great way to learn, show that you are learning and motivate your staff by recognising when your staff do well
3. Make a pact with the Section 151 officer on raising pre application income whereby you will go over and above to drive up income only if the income can stay in Planning. This a great motivational incentive for staff to drive up income and can provide the justification for recruiting more staff.
4. Change your job descriptions and staff structures so that staff can move around the department and gain promotion without having to apply for a new job. You must keep the best staff wherever they currently sit in the organisation otherwise someone else will poach them.
5. Become best friends with your nearest RTPI accredited Planning school. Then you can find out who are the best students and entice them to work for your Planning department
6. Introduce a ’10 minute’ officer report for the simple stuff. If a householder application has no objections and is recommended for approval it will only be the case officer and signing off officer who ever reads it so why spend more than 10 mins writing it?
7. Set regular meetings with senior managers to agree your position on certain key developments and ensure you are proactively delivering the things that matter to your Council. One Council calls them ‘Cobra’ meetings – you know who you are!
8. Invest in your website to maximise self help. Put your heads together as Planners and think about all the general questions you get asked on a day-to-day basis and then put them down in a Q and A section of your Planning pages. This means you don’t have to spend time answering phone calls and emails with the same old answers.
9. Get people who know very little about Planning – your partner, your children, your next door neighbour – and test the wording of Planning Committee reports and information on your website. If they don’t understand it then you need to change the wording. Remember Planning is public facing and so the public need to understand what you are saying.
10. Send out a pack of information with the Planning Committee agenda for Members alongside the officer report that includes plans, Google Map reference and photographs. Then at Planning Committee the officer presentations can be limited to no more than 5 minutes highlighting any key points that need to be highlighted to the Committee.

So there you go. If you already follow all the top tips well done and let PAS know if you have others that we can share. If there is something new, try it out and let us know how it went.

Most importantly keep the faith and remember – you are never alone.

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Staying afloat as cuts bite

I spent a few hours the other day with the senior management team of a planning and regeneration service. The session was to think about how they would deal with significant budget reductions up to 2020.

As the LGA reported in the Future Funding Outlook 2014 (see also Under Pressure – how councils are dealing with cuts), “ With social care and waste spending absorbing a rising proportion of the resources available to councils, funding for other council services drops by 43% in cash terms by the end of the decade…’. This can’t be done by snips here and there – the well of efficiency savings has almost run dry. It will need a fundamental rethink about the service delivery.

Myself and a planning peer facilitated the discussions. Everyone in the room knew that they alone can’t find the answers and that many further conversations will be needed ‘upwards’ with the council about ways of working, appetite for risk, local priorities and the politics of making difficult decisions. And ‘downwards’ with team members (most good ideas come from within).

Firstly, I was pleased to see that this was up for discussion. It’s not an easy thing to start but they understood that a head in the sand approach wasn’t sensible. The Director knew that the ‘low hanging fruit’ had already been picked; nothing particularly easy or obvious was left. the team was keen to start thinking about the long term approach to the budget pressures they anticipated over the next few years. They were ‘ owning the problem’.

We started by looking at the current core services and challenging whether they were really necessary. What is it that you do that delivers the councils priorities? What would happen if you stopped? I mean really, what would happen if you stopped. OK, if you can’t stop, can you do it differently?

Inevitably the conversation went beyond the costs of the activity, and savings if not done (or done differently) into customer expectations and political risks. Stop doing site visits on all but majors (use google earth)? Local Development Orders for 3-walled extensions (we approve most anyway)? Enforcement only for high priority breaches? Stop plan-making and rely on the NPPF?

Eyebrows were raised at these initially unacceptable thoughts. But that was the point. Accepting that implementing any of these might also bring risk – at some point something would go wrong, Is it time for a shift in the balance of risk and what is the political appetite for this? How long can we afford to mitigate against risks to the degree we do now? Of course the politicians are crucial in this – everyone talks about how difficult decisions will need to be made. Public expectation will be managed (which is difficult in a time of economic recovery elsewhere).

Then we did crystal ball gazing. Imagine it is 2020. What does the service look like? This was interesting, and of course there are many unknowns, not least national and local elections, and probably more changes to the planning system (will there still be one) and local government finance.

These were some thoughts.

• A commissioning council with proper accountability for running business units, including (popular, this one) breaking the relationship between a service and the non-negotiable central recharges. You pay how much for legal advise and there isn’t even a planning specialist? Directors should be proper, accountable, business managers free to choose to buy the print and design service, IT, legal advice, from the best/cheapest supplier.
  Self certification of planning decisions where they accord with the plan?
• One consent (Penfold anyone?) for planning and building control?
• The principle of ‘customer pays’ embedded even more – so deregulated planning fees are a must.
• Developers/landowners financing action area or masterplans?
•  Enforcement investigations for non priority breaches – well then the complainant pays
•  Combine development management and building control into a ‘pre shovel ready’ and ‘post’ teams?
• Devolved decision making to neighbourhood forums or parish councils (which already happens in Arun)
• Upwards decision making to a combined strategic authority?
• And the nirvana of a paperless office – all communications by email or the cloud

And more ideas. Some would need changes to legislation, some corporate decisions, and some are within the gift of the Director and team to deliver. Some areas we didn’t have time to go into – ironically the main one being around costs! But it is a start.

Hats off to those involved. These are difficult conversations with implications for people’s jobs. Not just their employment, but work that they like, value, believe in and want to continue with.

We didn’t get anywhere near to a service costing 43% less. But some things were said ‘out loud’ , ideas are buzzing.

I’m interested in what other councils are doing on this – are you having similar conversations? If not, what is your strategy for the years ahead? PAS would like to develop some work on this If you’d like to work with us on this, please let me know alice.lester@local.gov.uk

development management – planning on the front foot

I was a bit irritated by the recent article  on development management by Croft and Sheppard in the TCPA journal, but it has prompted me to think again about DM in the context of the new world as characterized by the draft NPPF.  The understanding that development management is foremost about proactive work and problem solving seemed absent in this article.

Being in the hub if the wheel is not what DM is about if  it’s just acting as a means of transmitting stresses from one place to another.

Survival skills for planners

I heard Greg Clark, Minister for Decentralization speak earlier this week and while its clearly it’s all change again on Planet Planning, he was enthusiastic (he said) about planners taking on a more facilitative role in making sure that the development  investment delivered the place that communities want.  Unpicking development plans and reinventing them to weight neighbourhood desires more heavily is one thing, but he was also talking about collaborative working between local authorities and communities to enable and encourage development investment in the right stuff to meet the whole range of goals.

He talked about the negativity of adversarial development control  (my words would be squashing the ability of planning to innovate and problem solve) and the need to look at and persuade the community to look at  development differently.   While the Minister wasn’t giving away much detail – I was busy filling in the gaps with a description of development management!

 We have been talking up this approach for three years now.  The supported learning groups that POS have facilitated been wildly encouraged or deeply frustrated at the difficulty of changing attitudes, sometimes in equal measure and sometimes both at the same time.  But over the whole country, I have been interested to know what the pace of change has been. 

 PAS recently commissioned a survey to find out whether Councils had changed their practices to take on development management  ways of working.   DM was never intended to be a one size fits all approach,  but we used a few practices to indicate aspects of a transformation. The result is a half full glass:

Invest to earn

When improving the public sector, and in planning especially, and almost always when ICT is involved, we expect to hear the phrase “invest to save”. It’s become part of the branding – it avoids the need for value judgements like “it will improve our service” or “the public will find it useful” or even “it’s a good idea and I’m going to back it”.

This month’s announcement from Chris Huhne on energy means that you can expect to hear a new twist on this phrase – the ability for councils to resell energy to the national grid means their programme of renewable energy provision becomes an invest to earn proposition. At least for the sensible ones. But what does this mean for planners ?

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……

  

If good pre-application discussions are the key….

….to effective development management, then what can we do when faced with developers who refuse to participate?

Getting around the country and talking to planners in many different authorities, I hear many tales and anecdotes.  Sometimes these are one off experiences, and sometimes simply amusing, but the other day I was surprised to hear a comment from a senior manager at a large city authority about a trend they were having trouble coming to terms with.

I will spare the blushes and simply say that this area seems to be weathering the economic uncertainties and retains a healthy number of development proposals.  But the officers are increasingly concerned about the number of developers who are rejecting their well resourced pre-application system to simply push in the planning application.  These are not the really big strategic developments, but the windfall sites that nonetheless remain very important for this authority to make the most of if they are to work towards their spatial vision.

Our conventional wisdom in the past few years has been that the larger development firms have been working on the same culture change that planning authorities have been trying to implement.  That is, to make the planning process more of a discussion and problem solving experience than the adversarial punch up we have been familiar with.  So why is the temptation to just push in the application still so strong?

It would be naive to think that there was just one reason,  but a lot of them boil down to time and certainty of the outcome.  The developer who puts his application in without pre-application discussion (or enough of it) is, I was told, happy enough to have a refusal if that’s what it comes to.  With a refusal, the matters that are most seriously wrong with the proposal in the council’s view are spelled out.  The so called wish list of improvements, that the planners would seek along the discussion path are dispensed with – if it’s not strong enough to make a reason for refusal then the developer doesn’t have to bother with it.  The appeal is submitted.  Then, during the wait for the inquiry, the scheme can be amended to satisfy the refusal reasons.  If they can’t be satisfied, then nothing lost;  the inquiry proceeds – no time lost.

The overwelming problem is that as things are, with this approach the community is sidelined to a consultee rather than an engaged participant.  All the efforts to make the spatial planning system truely an arena where partnership working between the council, the developers and the other agencies and organisations  work for better planning outcomes is pretty well wasted time.

My next question then is this:  along with the reform of  plan making and development management, does the spatial planning system need the code of practice for appeals (particularly public inquiries) to be reviewed as well?  Is there a way there to explicitly promote a commitment to pre-application discussion, or is it that planning services just need to pull out more stops to  make the pre-application part of development management still more slick and more certain?

Development Management

[This article was originally published in Planning Magazine, September 2007]

This month I want to talk about development management, what it actually means, its role within the new planning system and how it affects the traditional divisions between policy and DC teams.

Contrary to some opinions, development management is not development control by another name. A new approach has been driven by the implementation of the 2004 Act, not referred to directly or given any clear guidance, but a fundamental and integral part of the spatial planning activity. Development management is the culture change from reactive assessment of others’ proposals to seeking and shaping developments.

Developments will need to be assessed in the way in which they contribute to the outcomes that are needed by the community – expressed in the sustainable community strategy and LDF core strategies. Typical local plans policies that are written to prevent all foreseeable sorts of undesirable development should no longer be necessary. Local policies should guide development towards fitting patterns of local distinctiveness

In this culture change, managers will need to consider the shape and structure of planning services to meet this challenge. Communication between the people who write the policies and those whose job is to facilitate good development is essential. As the spatial planning system evolves, we should look to the profession evolving to value facilitation and communication skills along side skills of spatial awareness, urban design and land use analysis. Professional judgement, will be based on an understanding of the future of a community, instead of the use of the rule book – a new, and somewhat challenging world.
Regulatory planning activity will still exist but this will become a diminishing role restricted to assessing small developments that fall outside permitted development. Would this residual activity be better integrated into other regulatory services?
Recognising the need for more guidance and direction in tackling this challenging role for planners, PAS is running a series of seminars to explore this topical issue from next month.

To find out more about how the services offered by PAS can help, visit http://www.pas.gov.uk