NO PLANNERS: BREW YOUR OWN
The UK has run out of planners. All gone. Queue if you want but you’re wasting your time.
It was a comment by Jon Palmer, Head of Planning at the City of Milton Keynes that struck home with me: ‘there is a chronic shortage of planners within the industry as a whole. Vacancies cannot be filled now.’
So he has set up his own Academy to produce his own. A bit like home-brewing.
Hang on a minute. This is a brilliant initiative, sorry Jon, but that is not the role of a Chief Planner. That’s the role of central government.
But it is not performing and what do we do with poorly performing organisations. We either shut them down or go elsewhere. And that’s what Jon has done – he has set up his own micro-brewery.
So, let’s roll it out. We can have micro-breweries for planners all over the country.
And what will the government (stop laughing) think of this?
Well, if the civil servants can be dragged back to the office they might wake up to the real crisis.
A House of Lords report points out that there is an ‘evolving crisis’ in planning. Well your lordships, it’s fully mature now and, sorry to tell you this, it has been for some time.
And this problem goes to the root of our education system. Rishi got it right when he said all students should study mathematics to A-level and Physics and Chemistry and the rest.
Why do we continue to churn out graduates in the arts to the detriment of technical subjects?
If we are to build the homes people need in, say 2040 (let’s be realistic) we need to start now so that we have the planners to deliver.
SURELY IT COULDN’T HAPPEN HERE
Burkina Faso in central Africa is a country with 20 million people. (If you can find it on the map, you were obviously paying attention in Geography class.) In January, the military overthrew the democratically elected President Roch Marc Kaboré.
A week later (not 46 days) the military junta restored the constitution and appointed Paul-Henri Sandaogo Damiba as interim president. He was then overthrown in a second coup in September and replaced by Captain Ibrahim Traoré.
Three presidents in a year…it couldn’t happen here.
Have a good weekend
Tom