Planner pen portraits
Number four: The community focussed planner
After all these years, I thought I would have packed away my drawing board by now, but Neighbourhood Planning has kept me busy doing work I have a passion for. If I wasn’t supporting communities develop their plans, I’d be volunteering to do one for where I live.
I initially considered studying architecture at university, but planning required lower grades to get in. I think it’s a myth that if you’re working in the public sector as a planner, you’re working in the public interest. I don’t think it’s that different between the two sectors actually: in the local authority you have to satisfy the Council’s agenda just like the private planner has to follow the client’s agenda. And that agenda is often detrimental; the profit motive can be so damaging.
Planning deals with such big and important issues, it has to be done collaboratively so I work with communities and to challenge some of the received wisdom that too many planners pass off as ‘professional expertise’.
The public interest is making sure everyone is heard equitably. I worry the balance has shifted in planning too far towards developers and public benefit is hard to achieve. You can’t just have a time-is-money attitude when working with communities, except when I calculate my fee schedule, of course!
Quotes
"It’s about the community, the public, however you want to describe it, as opposed to the individual and their particular needs or wishes. An individual, if you’ve got an interest in something, you’re not going to get an objective overview."
"The point of planning is things in the right places, delivering what people need to live decent lives."
"In some places, the purpose of planning is not to refuse permission for anything because going to public inquiry costs a lot of money and the council is not prepared to pay those bills. Granting planning permission for more houses means you get a bigger Council Tax base."
"I think we’re back in mythology, that by working in the public sector as a planner, you’re working in the public interest."
"You get a change of administration from Tory to Labour, Labour to Tory or whatever, where you will find a sudden, dramatic change and therefore, the planners go bump, bump, clunk, clunk, click, just like a fruit machine and they start behaving differently."
"I think I probably had greater aspirations for what planning might, could and should achieve in a more visioning sense, future communities, exciting new futures, all those sorts of things, making radical change."
"That sort of notion of professionalism which has got that bit around territorialism as well as protectionism and boundary … but there’s also professionalism which is about being outgoing, about understanding where your profession fits."
Notes
May work in local government, particularly larger authorities which have staff dedicated to neighbourhood planning, but more likely to be in a specialist consultancy or a self-employed consultant
Perhaps older and more comfortable in having the notion of the technical expertise of planners be critiqued
Most likely a passionate advocate of the principle that planning should be about engaging communities to try and make their environments and lives better
Probably thinks there is a place for professional expertise, but this should not be protectionist
May be concerned that political reforms are undermining planning and that the aspiration is gone, to be replaced by ‘just preventing the worst’
May have had a community focus to their work predating neighbourhood planning (if in England)