Recently in NPPF Category

Labour Party Conference.  Does anyone care?  Described by journalists in terms reminiscent of some sort of bizarre dawn raid, Mr Edward Miliband has appropriated the term "one nation" from the Tories.  Oh the derring-do of the man!  I'm sorry, but I find this all too depressing.  The fact that we are still palpably NOT one nation - the gap between the south and the north hugely widened by the last (Labour) administration - is one of the most manifest symptoms of our moral collapse as a nation.  Frankly, a civilised person would be at a complete loss to try to explain it. But there you go.  Mr Miliband thought "one nation" had a ring about it, as Mr Disraeli did before him (in...er...1852).

We do not progress.  We fiddle while Rome burns. 

At any political gathering though, there's always room for a pop at planning.  Mr Hilary Benn, who shadows Mr Eric Pickles as Secretary of State for Communities (an extraordinary misnomer in itself), said yesterday that the Labour Party will oppose "outrageously centralising" government plans to take decision making powers away for under-performing local authorities and hand them to the Planning Inspectorate (PINS). 

I guess we should be glad to see housing is today's lead story (well, at least, conservatories are).  But WHAT to make of this morning's hotchpotch of announcements in respect of planning and building?

The Daily Telegraph this morning carries the headline "Eric Pickles will tempt the builders back to work on 200,000 new homes" and the story reads that ministers are to "help" developers in cases "where planning permission has been granted but construction has been stalled".  The "help" seems to consist of talking to local authorities about renegotiating unaffordable s106 agreements.


Wednesday is Nottingham day for UKR (most weeks anyway). Gill Marshall (UKR Head of Love and Laughter) and I clambered aboard the East Midlands line as usual yesterday morning for an action-packed field trip.

It started with a cup of tea and a Twix, as usual (sold to us by Beverley) and culminated in a bottle of wine with the Sheriff of Nottingham (I kid you not. I have photographic evidence, just as soon as I work out how to retrieve same from my wretched iPhone) at the Via Fosse.

So the NPPF was met with a muted reception this week. Hip hip hooray. The sainted Liz Peace summed it up by Tweeting: "NPPF pleases most people most of the time. Is it a miracle or deft footwork? Time will tell." Well, my money's on deft footwork, definitely (and, she muttered darkly, if there'd been a bit more of it prior to publication of the draft we might have been spared all that exhausting furore). You'll have seen that my old mucker, Alex "Hot-Head" Kendall is calling for "a vote of no-confidence in the management board of the RTPI for the hysteria they have caused - a smoke screen for high subs and crap service". Go Alex! You have to admire her spirit.
 

So, finally, the NPPF (now down to a slim 50 pages, I understand) gets published today. Will all hell break loose again?
 
Listening to the calm, reasoned, reasonable, grown-up tone of Greg Clark on the R4 Today programme this morning, the optimist (c'est moi) indulges in the fervent hope that the frenzied collective hysterics of the National Trust, the CPRE, Simon Jenkins, the Daily Telegraph, Sir Bufton-Tufton and Hyacinth Bouquet do not get visited upon us all over again for the spring of 2012. Blimey, the prospect is too exhausting for words. 
 
And what an extraordinary over-reaction it all was last summer, doncha think? You'd seriously have thought that a "presumption in favour of sustainable development" was on a par with world poverty and pestilence. There was one exquisite moment, you may remember, when the Greek financial crisis was - in all seriousness - blamed on their lax planning laws. And at that stage you knew the plot had been lost, completely and utterly. 
 

I have now been partying - hard - for two solid days, starting with my champagne tea in the Landmark with Alan J Smith OBE DL on Monday (remind me to tell you about "Marilyn, the Dove of Love, in a Jo Malone bag" when I see you. I kid you not. It was hysterical). So I was, understandably, a little bleary this morning as I awoke from my (ahem) beauty sleep to find that the NPPF is yet again the lead item on the R4 Today programme. The select committee report on the NPPF was issued at midnight, and Clive Betts, the committee chair, was certainly up with the lark at 6.50am. And he seemed to communicate that the report was somewhat hostile, with the now familiar whiff of bureaucracy and green tone.
 
Of course, on closer scrutiny (thanking you Dr Evans) it would appear that the select committee report on the draft NPPF is nothing like as rabid as the press are making out. Rather than calling for a rewrite of the draft, it says: "There was little evidence of any desire to either retain the existing system or to start again on the NPPF." So, actually, this is a right result for Greg Clark and Grant Shapps, who are to be congratulated on achieving this extraordinary degree of consensus in what was a very fevered arena. And they are also to be congratulated on preparing to be open to further improvement when they look at what has been proposed. 
 

The two defining qualities of regeneration practitioners are that, first, they must be insanely optimistic and, second, they must be able to manage change (indeed, welcome and embrace it). But some changes should definitely be resisted; call me old-fashioned (and I certainly am) but the news that the Chopper Lump, the property industry's former haunt in the corner of Hanover Square, is to become a Dirty Martini (of all things!) bar surely must be one of the most miserable symptoms of living in this modern age.

The Chopper Lump was a seriously eccentric place and you sure as hell couldn't get a Martini there (dirty or otherwise). I won't be relaying anecdotes of my exploits in that fine emporium, but needless to say it is the end of an era. As "Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells" would have it: It Is A Disgrace.

But many changes are to be hugely welcomed. There are some that you can only wonder how they took so long to come about. The news that Grant Shapps is bringing in measures for councils to be able to ask prospective council tenants (and presumably those being nominated for housing associations) if they have another home, under new rules from next month, may come as a shock to some people (and not those who would defend the status quo).

I watched David Cameron's speech to Conservative Party Conference in eager anticipation, but I am now forced to agree with those pundits who think that annual party conferences should be consigned to history. In an era when the New York Stock Exchange can significantly rally on the slender basis of ONE favourable headline in the Financial Times, it beggars belief that Mr Cameron did not use his platform yesterday to deal decisively with the crisis in the world economy.

Without a huge amount of risk to him or his government, he could have done a bit of serious grandstanding for strong political leadership and collaborative working across the globe in order to significantly change sentiment (the mood music) in the world economic community and to face down hysteria. But there was a complete absence of any analysis as to the seriousness of the situation we're in, in what could only be described as a thoroughly competent domestic speech. And you have to wonder: who is he leading? The country, or the folk in the hall?

I vowed I would keep schtum about all this, but I just can't help myself: if you ever needed proof positive that the Daily Telegraph will stop at nothing in its absurd and shrill "Hands off our Land" campaign against the NPPF, you saw it yesterday when poor old Richard McCarthy was splashed all across the front page. Mr McCarthy's crime? He is leaving a senior post in CLG, to further pursue his career in urban regeneration with Capita Symonds.
 
In all reality, this has absolutely nothing to do with the NPPF. Where is the story?
 
Now, I've known Richard for a good many years (indeed, since he was CEO at Peabody, and he sat on my board at Paddington) and his commitment to the cause of regeneration could never be questioned.