Presidential visit to Northern Ireland

Maybe being 60 isn’t quite so bad? I had a lovely birthday weekend with my family and friends where the young went to bed first and appeared to recover slowest!

My first commitment of the week was meeting with the RTPI Executive Board. We are delighted to welcome three new members - Janice Morphet and Mark Southgate, Corporate Members elected for 2009-2010 and Young Planners representative Charlie Collins – I’m looking forward to working with them over the coming year. As an Institute we are approaching 23,000 members and are seeing the gender structure change from 70/30% male/female currently, to a 60/40% female/male intake of youth which is good to see. There are only three female trustees out of 15 although the RTPI General Assembly (GA) is moving towards a better mix. Nonetheless, 2008 RTPI President Janet O’Neill and future 2010 President Ann Skippers are female and I expect to see the trend of greater female involvement in the RTPI’s governance continue. A good example is the election of Leonora Rozee, a long standing member of GA as vice president of the Town and Country Planning Summer School, to be President next year.

However, I regret that we are not being so successful in addressing ethnicity with a very small percentage of members in comparison to the community we serve. Last year, the Board had two members from non white groups; this year none. This is one of the reasons I have chosen a presidential charity that concentrates on Africa, the largest of our Commonwealth friends. LINK Community Development http://www.lcd.org.uk is an educational charity that raises money for Black education. Their CEO Steve Blunden is an enthusiastic and able leader, growing the organisation to help promote understanding of the African issues in the West and bring about an improvement in educational attainment in Africa itself. We are discussing projects within RTPI Botolph Lane but I hope to raise enough money to provide a placement for one or two RTPI Young Planners to go out and promote better dialogue between planners and educators in local authorities and perhaps participate in a project such as building teachers housing in the rural areas to attract teachers there. Watch this space and expect me on my RTPI Presidential Regional and National visits to ask you to raise cash for this outstanding charity.

I also had my first Presidential engagement in the wonderful community that is Northern Ireland. My wife Philly and I visited Belfast and represented the RTPI at two events, both at Stormont, the most spectacular government building I have visited. The first was the RTPI-RSPB Northern Ireland Sustainable Planning Awards 2009 where we were treated to a wonderful series of presentations varying from a 60 hectare community to a small lock keepers cottage based centre providing visitor services as part of a tourist attraction. The winners included a Theatre in Derry that had been refurbished to provide community support of a truly sustainable nature. The link between the RTPI and RSPB is one of great synergy and may I thank the Director Aidan Lonergan, his team and the RTPI Northern Ireland (NI) Branch team for their excellent organisation.

The second event was the RTPI NI Branch Annual dinner addressed by the sometimes controversial Minister for the Environment, Sammy Wilson MP MLA. It was a memorable experience. Sammy was a kindred spirit, clearly hugely enthusiastic about planning and the RTPI. His after dinner speech was highly amusing but most importantly, extremely supportive of the RTPI NI Branch. At the moment, Northern Ireland is undergoing a Review of Public Administration including new District Councils with planning powers, previously applied solely from the centre. In my reply to Sammy I offered thanks on behalf of the RTPI for his support and extended the possibility of sharing with his department, perhaps at a Convention later in the year, some of our English experience of change and in particular lessons learned from our 2004 Act. Northern Ireland has a special opportunity to learn from English experience, good and bad, and commence a new period of sustainable and spatial planning that might be a catalyst for all the change the community is seeking. I wish them well.

At the end of the evening, the RTPI NI Branch Presidential chain was passed from Fiona McCandless to Gavan Rafferty, both clearly at the younger end of the profession! For Philly and I, it was a special visit as two of our children have recently married into Northern Irish families. We were both looked after with great kindness and courtesy by the RTPI NI Branch team for which we thank you. We love the Northern Irish community, although this coming Saturday when Ireland play England at Croke Park, Dublin, we will, of course, be supporting England!!!

Finally, many of you have visited this blog but nobody has responded to the issues I have raised. I encourage you all to do so, so that the blog becomes both a Presidential communications service to members and an opportunity for you to ask questions or raise issues for wider discussion.

All the best

Martin
2009 RTPI President

Green Planning Awards in Northern Ireland

left to right (front row): Declan Hill from Todd Architects representing the Woodbrook Project, Lisburn; Niall McCaughan from the Playhouse, Derry; Hugh McCann from Orchard Acre Barn, Fermanagh.
left to right (back row): Aidan Lonergan, Director RSPB NI; Martin Willey, RTPI President.

A shot of the finalists from the Awards.

The second week was if anything busier than the first week!

I started my second week as RTPI President with the SOLACE (Society of Local Authority Chief Executives and Senior Managers) Annual Dinner, an impressive event which provided me with the opportunity to meet their President, Trish Haines and a number of SOLACE officers and to meet old friends including Sir Michael Lyons, Chair of the BBC Trust and my erstwhile Chair of the English Cities Fund. He informed me that one of the schemes I helped identify outside Wakefield Railway Station was just starting on site 6 years after we started discussions! Make sure you go and see it – an exciting combination of mixed use and good design, linking the railway station with the city centre. I have to say Brindley Place eat your heart out.

Most importantly, SOLACE is an important potential partner for the RTPI in promoting the status of planners in Local Authorities. They need to be persuaded that a planner should ALWAYS be on a Local Authority Management Team, planning should ONLY be delivered by Chartered Members, and we need them to resource Local Development Frameworks (LDFs) as a matter of urgency in these difficult times. I will be discussing this issue further in my column next week in Planning.

I was part of a small RTPI team who met Sir Bob Kerslake, CEO of the Homes and Communities Agency (HCA) during the week. We met to discuss the scope for planners to be part of his "Single Conversation" with Local Authorities not least in the promotion of LDF resourcing, I am pleased to report there was a great deal of constructive dialogue. We also discussed the scope for a closer relationship between RTPI and HCA Regions. The issue of planners skills also emerged and Sue Percy's excellent work with the HCA Academy, previously the Academy of Sustainable Communities, will clearly continue. We will be holding further discussions shortly to see how relations might develop but it is clear that the RTPI's offer of support for the work of the HCA, through our Networks and Regions, might bare fruit. Watch this space!!

Next I met Steve Quartermain the Communities and Local Government (CLG) Chief Planner. We discussed, amongst many things, the possibility for higher levels of co-operation between our Regions and Government Offices (GOs). This will feature in my Regional visits this year. Some Regions invite a GO rep occasionally to their meetings, some do not. If we are to increase our influence as a body, perhaps we need to maintain regular correspondence with our GOs, collectively in the Regions, as well as for individual purposes? Steve is a great ambassador for the profession and we need to deliver results for him at CLG, particularly through the provision of practitioner experience and solutions. The RTPI Networks offer a ready made source of expertise here and Rynd Smith, RTPI Director of Policy and Practice will lead on this.

If you need reminding, my Presidential theme is "Planning Delivering Solutions" – The 2008 RTPI Awards ceremony, my last engagement of week 2, was a brilliant platform to expand on this message and provided dozens of "solutions" from throughout the UK. The event was a success due to the high calibre of award winners and superb organisation skills of Judy Woollett and her RTPI team. With the arrival of the National Policy Statements and the Infrastructure Planning Commission, it was a great joy to see the Channel Tunnel Rail Link: High Speed 1 win the Silver Jubilee Cup - a major infrastructure project delivered on time, on budget and with optimum, economic, environmental and community benefits. This surely bodes well for the planning process. For me personally, it was wonderful to meet so many friends from throughout the country, and to be approached by many colleagues with the phrase "Do you remember me" - difficult to miss me with the chain around my neck but impossible for me to remember everyone I have had the privilege of working with - and to hear "Do you remember me? You gave me my first job."

I’m celebrating a milestone this week – I’m turning 60 and I’ve got to say I am beginning to feel my age. But I’m not alone as two other RTPI colleagues share a birthday on Valentine’s Day - Janet O'Neill, RTPI President 2008 (but who of course is many years younger than me) and Rynd Smith. It’s bad enough having my surname but apparently my grandmother also wanted to call me "Valentine"!

Catch up soon,
Martin.


Photographs: © Haymarket

My first week as RTPI President

I’ve just passed the one week mark into my year as RTPI President after a wonderful inauguration at the Royal Society of Arts, with lots of friends from my previous life joining me on the evening, together with the RTPI General Assembly and last years’ excellent RTPI President Janet O’Neill, who all attendees congratulated on a terrific year. Any delusions of grandeur I might have had however were quickly erased by grand daughter number 1, Caissie, who said in a loud voice during the ceremony: “Why is Grumpy wearing a big necklace” of course referring to my RTPI Presidential chain!

My first engagement as President was acting as an RTPI representative at the annual RTPI West Midlands Region multi professional “Great Debate”. This was held at Arup’s excellent eco friendly offices in Solihull where the RTPI WM Regional chair Sue Manns resides. I’ve attached a photo to my blog showing most of the panel and despite representing planners, engineers, architects, surveyors and the new Homes and Communities Agencies (HCA) three of us were planners - myself, Paul Spooner (HCA) and Louise Brooke-Smith (Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors - RICS). The big issues were coping with the credit crisis which I plan to talk about more in my monthly column in Planning but we were also challenged on sustaining design quality and delivering Local Development Frameworks (LDFs). John Baker, chair of the Development Plans Network, gives a fascinating presentation on LDFs entitled “What are you waiting for?” and I share his sentiments!

Although many Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) have benefited from the injection of Planning and now Housing and Planning Delivery Grant (HPDG) to accelerate the LDF programme, large numbers are still some way off Core Strategy approval. It is absolutely essential that we deliver LDFs as quickly as possible and if we are short on capacity then we should look to capture the surplus delivery skills out there and available I suspect at reasonable rates? It may be that we have to persuade the department of Communities and Local Government (CLG) that HPDG should be made available on a more flexible basis to achieve this?

There is much good advice available from the Planning Inspectorate (PINS) and the Planning Advisory Service (PAS) and some Government Offices (GOs) are running mentoring schemes to share knowledge of efficient approaches without losing “local distinctiveness”. A number of us met the top team at CLG a week or so back and they are hugely supportive of the Spatial Plan Led process. At the RTPI we will continue to look at ways of disseminating best practice and encouraging the Regions and Nations to take a supportive lead. If we can identify additional sources of finance we will signpost them.

Design quality also emerged at my second presidential engagement at the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) concerning Design Review Panels (DRPs) supported by The Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment (CABE) and all of the design professions. Experience of DRPs was generally good, but there were issues regarding increasing councillor and community awareness of the importance of good design and also making sure our professional members are properly trained at University and through Continuing Professional Development (CPD) in the principles of good design. I know that Colin Haylock, RTPI Executive Board trustee, CABE commissioner, Chair of the RTPI Urban Design Network and Chair of the Urban Design Alliance is taking a lead in this area. The DRP team are also looking at increasing accountability of DRPs with Annual Reports and Councillor Briefings on the agenda.

I sign off my first blog in Somerset, snowed in, but a beautiful day nonetheless and look forward to hearing from you.

Martin

Picture: Katrina Sealey LBIPP