Planner pen portraits

Number three: The grandee of the consultancy

Growing up in a new town, I was exposed to planning from an early age. I still love the technical side of planning work and evidence. I’ve been lucky enough to work in good consultancies and have loved the variety and challenge of planning’s role as a development broker and facilitator. I’ve been around a while and I know all the main players in the development game.

I’m lucky enough that I can spend some time supporting the RTPI in my region and will tell anyone who listens how we need to move away from the old silo ‘private versus public’ attitudes: we should collaborate together as professionals to make better places and realise planning’s public interest purpose. Yes, that does mean delivering just the type of project I’ve currently got a commission on.

We need strong planning and brave politicians delivering good growth, with good infrastructure. Good development, development that involves thinking about place-making and sustainability, is possible and that’s what the public need.

I often think on the value of planning as I’m flying to my next project, looking out of the window from business class at the terrible sprawl in countries without a robust planning system.

Quotes

"I always thought the role of elected members and the secretary of state was taking decisions in the public interest. I thought that plan making was trying to create environments that were not only efficient, but in the public interest [but my view has now changed]."

"[The purpose of planning?] I would like to think it was making people’s lives more comfortable, helping with creation of job opportunities, assisting moves towards sustainable development. I think, regretfully, we’ve lost many of the tools that we had and financial resources we had in the past."

"I think there’s been a fairly consistent thread throughout my career, understanding that planning, development, clearly has an impact on the public, on communities and the onus is, I would suggest, on the planner to ensure that there’s an awareness of those impacts and where they are detrimental, come up with mitigation measures to address that."

"The purpose of planning is about working in the public interest, or having an awareness of the public."

"It sounds high minded but throughout my career we’ve turned down several juicy private developer commissions who have made it quite plain they want to smash their way through local authority policy."

"It is a balance between delivering a viable scheme that meets clients’ needs with serving the public interest and I’ll hold my hands up, there have been projects where the public interest has been squeezed out."

Notes

  • Has spent most of their career in private sector planning, but may have had a short spell (particularly earlier in the career) in local government

  • Is currently a consultant but has engaged with the wider planning community, perhaps through involvement in a body like the RTPI or commissions on behalf of the Ministry

  • Has a position of relative security in their employment, enabling them to be more selective with clients and engage with the wider planning community

  • Likely understands the notion of a public interest justification to planning, but perhaps believes this relates primarily to their own area of expertise, such as sustainability

  • Perhaps takes a very growth-centric view, seeing planning as about managing impacts from development and delivering development

  • May well admit to some previous commissions they are less proud of, where perhaps the public benefit of a scheme has been ‘squeezed’ by something like viability