A Disproportionate Response to Proportionality

LVIAs are vanity projects. Discuss.

Who are they intended for? 

Often not the reader.

Do they actually get the message across or are they so bogged down in process that they've missed their point?

I think so.

Overly lengthy, formulaic, impenetrable, jargony landscape assessments with no tables and no point to make. My pet hate.

Dull to write and worse to read with no point to make.

Is there a better solution? Do you even need an LVIA? Does setting out whether the magnitude is medium or medium-high actually help anyone understand what the issues are? 

I'm not saying that LVIA doesn't have value, of course it does. Sometimes you need that comparative distinction, particularly in EIA, but often you don't.  Often a simpler, more approachable and, importantly to the client, cheaper document will tell the story.

And your document needs to tell the story. Could you explain your argument to your mate in the pub? Does your report convey that point? And does it do it succinctly in a way that can be read by a non professional?

If not, then I'd argue that document has failed.

Make it purposeful, make it succinct, make it robust. 

More words = less message.

And with that last in mind, I'm signing off.

Local - But Not That Local! Labour's Plan to Power Up Britain

Swerving around the obvious sections about how the Tories have ruined the country, I found Labour's plan to get us all building again plausible in principle and, well, exciting, if a little shaky on the delivery. 

One of my greatest bug bears with planning is the lack of regional thinking for large scale planning policy. Cities, such as Oxford and Leicester for example, are in constant negotiation with the surrounding authorities to accommodate their housing needs. And don't get me started on Green Belt, I have other blogs for that.

Zoom in...zoom in...zoom in...too far!

Labour wants to introduce the awfully named 'Take Back Control Act' (MAGA anyone?) providing greater power to 'local' leaders (but how local?) who have "skin in the game". Local Growth Plans will be produced for city regions, based upon "sensible economic geographies" (my new favourite phrase), with the document containing numerous references to the successes of Labour mayors. This, they say, will give them the right balance of scale versus local knowledge, making policy on a scale that is not "so local that it does not reflect people's working, commuting and social patterns". Localism is dead, long live Localishism?

So far so plausible.

So how are they going to do this? Obviously planning reform, the obligatory prospective new Government buzz phrase. In the 'what exciting metaphor is the planning system this year' game, the planning system is now 'sclerotic' and Labour are telling us they are the much needed medicine to fix it all (spoiler alert, sclerosis isn't curable).

• First of all the 'Housing Recovery Plan', to be delivered in the 'first weeks and months'. Does this mean it will be drip fed or that it will take an awfully long time to read? 
• Reintroduction of mandatory housing targets, giving local leaders a say in the 'how' but not the 'if'.
• Passports for urban brownfield sites (presumably so they can go on holiday to Conservative seats).
• Building 1.5 million new homes in the next Parliament and in the 'right' places (Conservative seats again?).
• Employing 300 new planning officers to make it all happen.

1.5 million homes in 'the next Parliament', so five years? I don't need to point out to you the obvious flaw in this proposal. Even if we all magically had an application ready to go the day after the election (alright, I know you do), nobody is putting any of those houses on the ground for well over a year, probably two, that's 20-40% of the time gone. So, best case scenario, there are three years to build 1.5 million homes? Plus all the nice new R&D, industry and infrastructure that we'll also be building at the same time. We can do HS3 in the next five years right? And obviously the UK's housebuilders can build that many properties in that timeframe...

To make this happen, the new government will pull out of the ether 300 new planning officers. Presumably, these 300 officers, who have been sat around waiting for this opportunity, will each have 5000 houses in their pockets. And of course, these planning officers will single handedly manage the entire caseload of a scheme passing through planning, reviewing the ecology, the landscape, the transport, the heritage and so on. It's OK though, because the new Government will release its 'Skills England' programme "to identify skills needs in each area and work with education providers, local leaders and business to fill them". I assume the first chapter will be how to build the time machine to go back ten years to train the relevant candidates.

I may be being glib and scathing (where is that sarcasm font when one needs it?) but I very much like the principle of a more strategic and regional approach to planning, the potential to employ economies of scale within planning authorities and the 'city region' approach. I applaud this and am excited for its potential benefits.

However, like many of you, I am sceptical of the ability to deliver those ambitious targets. If all else fails, they can always revert to the Conservative hospitals tactic of counting extensions as new houses and properties that have already been built.

Landscape Horses for Assessment Courses

A question I often come across is "what type of landscape document is needed when"? Do you need an LVIA or an LVA? What is the difference and when are they most (cost) effective?

Its not unusual to meet clients who have been sold an LVIA too early in the design process when they have no scheme to assess, when a technical note or other initial due diligence advice would have sufficed, and been cheaper, so here is your handy guide to finding the right landscape horse for your course.

What is It?	When Do you Need It?	What Does it Do?	Benefits	Cons
LVIA Landscape and Visual Impact Assessment	Planning applications EIA development Complicated / sensitive sites with numerous receptor groups	Uses defined sensitivity, magnitude and significance criteria to define the comparative importance of identified likely effects	Clearly defined criteria that can be compared	Expensive Jargony Inaccessible Can be unnecessarily lengthy
LVA Landscape and Visual Appraisal	Planning applications Non EIA development Less complicated / sensitive sites	Less clearly defined. Similar to LVIA but simpler and doesn’t need to use assessment criteria although this varies by provider	Simpler, cheaper, easier to understand and more accessible	No defined criteria to make comparisons
Technical Note	Pre app discussions Representations on more complicated sites where vision document alone isn’t ‘enough’	Identifies risks and opportunities Makes recommendations to masterplan design Helps define developable area Tells the story	Cheaper than LVA 'Does the job'	Generally needs to be ‘upgraded’ for an application
Scribbles and Emails	Development of masterplan proposals When you need to understand potential developable area	Identifies opportunities and constraints Helps give realistic idea of developable area Identifies red flags	Very cheap 'Does the job'	No formal outputs

 

Helping You Avoid Making Faberge Omelettes

I am a Landscape Planner and I can save you money.

Isn't that what every client wants to hear? Well, I mean it, and all it will cost you is... Actually, it will cost you, but it will be comparative peanuts, and it will save you a lot of money, time (i.e. more money) and keep your landowners and investors happy (i.e. less stress).

When you undertake your initial due diligence, before your capacity assessments, we can help you. Before you’ve pitched the investors or made an offer to the landowner, we can help you identify the risks and opportunities that will affect your developable area.

“You cannot make an omelette without breaking eggs”. The idea of balancing risk and reward is not new. But that balancing act is an art and a science, where one is not rewarded for blindly taking risk. So how do you decide which is a risk worth taking, an egg to be broken? Or when that egg is actually a Fabergé egg that needs to be preserved. Armed with that advice, you can negotiate with greater confidence on the potential value of the development, share out the risk and prepare your partners for the obstacles to bringing the project to fruition.

Our clients understand this, and they get us onboard early, sometimes sending us the particulars of a site and asking for an opinion before they bid. We can give an initial steer on red flags and, very rarely, will identify a site that is so high risk we'd recommend avoiding it entirely. Isn't that what you need to know as a developer?

Here is a real scenario: a Green Belt site with a ridge running down the centre, well enclosed by strong defensible boundaries and well related to the existing built form. It looked fantastic on paper. On the site visit, it was possible to see that half of the site was visible from the nearby AONB and, more importantly, development in that half of the site would introduce development into views where there was currently none. Half of that site suddenly became high risk and was heavily recommended to be excluded from the developable area. I was on site for an hour and helped the client make a better informed decision about the value of that land.

We understand that the Masterplanner's job is to balance all of the different, and often conflicting, requirements of the consultant team, to come up with a solution that will satisfy the council and, most importantly for the client, be financially viable. As consultants, we have to be pragmatic, and to understand that if the finances don't add up, the whole exercise is academic. Our job as consultants is to identify risk and help the Masterplanner and the client reach that solution, and then to help them bring the council on board.

This doesn't need to be an expensive process either. We understand that, at the initial stages of a project's planning journey, there is little budget to play with and that you don't necessarily need a formatted report and a CAD rendered plan.  Instead, you need distilled advice, risks and opportunities of the site from external views to give you a better handle for your initial capacity assets – the key points set out on a sketch plan and a call to talk it through. If all goes well, you can come back for the polished, public report for early pre-app discussions or representations to the development plan.

Adding in ecology and arboriculture to the mix can add further insight. As an example, we regularly work on large strategic greenfield sites. These sites are often crossed by a network of hedgerows and trees. These are valuable landscape features, but in the masterplanning process, something has to give. Which ones can go and which ones have to stay? The Arboriculturalists and Ecologists can provide a hierarchy of importance, identifying the defunct, species poor category C examples, rather than the species rich, tree laden category A, or, even more important: the veteran tree? That allows you and the masterplanner understand where those quality eggs are.

Early environmental due diligence may feel like a drain of scarce resources at the start of the project, when the available pot to spend is small, but it can pay back hugely down the line and help you avoid making a Fabergé omelette.