The Audley Square carpark, pic courtesy caudwellphilanthropy
Could planners help unlock a new wave of charitable giving? A billionaire philanthropist thinks they can. John Caudwell, who made his fortune by building and selling his mobile phone business for £1.5 billion, is proposing to turn the air above a central-London car park into up to £100 million – and then give the money to charity.
Since the formation of the coalition government nearly two years ago, Department for Communities and Local Government ministers have been showing off their localist credentials at every opportunity. Communities secretary Eric Pickles gleefully set about abolishing “failed Soviet tractor style top-down planning targets” in 2010, while housing minister Grant Shapps earlier this year rejected MPs’ call for a “top-down national strategy for regeneration”. There’s even a “minister for decentralisation” – Greg Clark – who last month described the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) as putting “unprecedented power in the hands of communities to shape the places in which they live”. Read more »
CIL Watch returns with a bumper round-up of intelligence on the Community Infrastructure Levy, including news from London, Huntingdonshire, Colchester, Exeter, Bath and East Cambridgeshire. Read more »
pic courtesy MarkHillary on Flickr
So there we have it. The government is not going to perform a U-turn on a third runway at Heathrow Airport. At least not any time soon.
The government’s claims that Britain is reducing its CO2 emissions have been seriously undermined by a report from the Energy and Climate Change Committee.
Long-running radio soap opera The Archers has recently featured a storyline about a controversial planning application for a “super dairy” unit housing 1,000 cows or more. This week the ongoing row over the plan reached boiling point on the day of the district council planning meeting (to listen to the episode, click here). Read more »
A lot has been written about the Republic of Ireland’s ‘ghost estates’ and the housing madness that engulfed the country prior to its economic collapse, but a new report by Ireland’s National Trust, An Taisce, claims to shed some light on the extent of the failure of the Irish planning system.
A halt to public spending on sculptures, a vow to make prisoners build sea defences and a new “international hub airport” in Kent are among the policies of the smaller candidates and parties campaigning in the London mayoral and local elections.
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Jamie Carpenter is nostalgic for the days when DCLG press releases were turgid, incomprehensible documents which made little or no attempt to sell the department’s policies to the general public. Read more »
It must have been little comfort for the staff of Planning Aid England who were made redundant last week that the government confirmed a temporary funding reprieve for the service at the eleventh hour.
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