News and Resources

In all the Brexit noise, like me you may have missed that a draft Bill of Parliament is shortly to be published by DEFRA that will have direct relevance for English planners and planning lawyers. The European Union (Withdrawal) Act 2018 was enacted on 26 June 2018. As a result of amendments to the Bill …

We are now clearer as to what lies ahead, for the next year at least: the documents and deadlines are beginning to come thick and fast. The appointed panel of inspectors (Roisin Barrett, William Fieldhouse and David Smith) set out this timetable in their Panel Note No 1 (August 2018): • End of August 2018 …

What if your development were subject to a section 106 agreement that provided for a commuted sum to be paid towards affordable housing, the precise amount payable to be calculated in accordance with a formula; at the date that the agreement was completed in 2003 the formula would have arrived at a commuted sum of …

Stop me if you’ve heard this song before but… The clamour continues for Parliament to revise the principles of compulsory purchase compensation, currently set out in section 5 of the Land Compensation Act 1961. None of the clamourers have, as far as I know, set out precisely what amendments they would make to section 5, …

It is financially, legally and politically challenging to deliver new communities but without them the gap will continue to widen as between the quantity – and quality – of homes that the country needs and those that are built. Credit should be given to the Government for continuing to push. Are its efforts too diffuse …

If you are asking this in the context of People Over Wind (EU Court of Justice, 12 April 2018), you are asking the wrong question. Whilst the reference to “mitigation” is useful shorthand (as in my 20 April 2018 blog post, EU Court Ruling: Ignore Mitigation Measures In Habitats Screening), the precise position is more complicated …

“We’ve got to have rules and obey them. After all, we’re not savages. We’re English, and the English are best at everything.” (W. Golding, Lord of the Flies) David Cameron was reported in a Third Sector piece last year as accepting that his Big Society agenda (first set out in detail in his 19 July …

“We’ve got five years, my brain hurts a lot We’ve got five years, that’s all we’ve got” (David Bowie) The new NPPF introduces the requirement for local planning authorities to use a standard method to arrive at their local housing needs assessment, “unless exceptional circumstances justify an alternative approach which also reflects current and future …

If you are a user of this blog, you may be interested in our new resource: The Town Library. It has been a labour of love. In starting up as a planning law firm, what we really wanted was a case law service providing weekly summaries of, and hypertext links through to, all final judgments …

My 14 April 2018 blog post Telephone Kiosks v Homes commented on the rash of prior approval applications for “telephone kiosks” under Part 16 Class A of Schedule 2 of the Town and Country Planning (General Permitted Development) (England) Order 2015. I queried in passing as to whether some of these applications met the test …