The funding boost for housing in the budget is welcomed but Housing Associations are struggling to manage regulatory requirements on existing stock. How might more design-led and digital approaches help them increase their capacity to build? Sign up pages.tpximpact.com/en-gb/digital-…

Make rules to follow not reports to (not) read

So much to break down here "We simply have to comply with the law"... but the law didn't say anything specific, they were simply told "this won't do" by a Quango and had to invent their own mitigation 1/n

Government needs to make rule-based policy and bring some Arms length bodies back in house or at least reduce the length of the arms. The efficiency they are meant to bring does not consider whole lifecycle costs

Since the HS2 bat tunnel is back in the news (turns out it may actually kill the bats), time for one more story. Which came first – HS2 or the bats? 🚄🦇🧵

Probably gonna read this UK AI strategy stuff on Wednesday. Big decision is coffee or pints. Probably coffee.

Yup it’s AI hype week so why not join in. I have fears but also some optimisim that it could help level the playing field - btwn experts and citizens and councils and planning consultants - but it needs government to fix the data and make rules clearer planningresource.co.uk/article/1902...

More positive pro-growth noises today in terms of cracking down on spurious JR but still dealing with the ‘shit out’ problem. Our antiquated system of opaque planning processes and rules provides far too many footholds for ‘spurious’ challenges.

This comment piece in Inside Housing is one of those rather muddled and mealy-mouthed attempts to defend the indefensible (in this case, the private land value capture sector) insidehousing.co.uk/comment/streng… Here’s a 🧵 to translate and unpack some of its sillier lines

Had great fun talking about planning, evidence and mysteries (and numbers) with Mike Rose and Christopher Argent | Generation CFO | GENCFO open.spotify.com/episode/6yYrdT…

Roy Ayers and James Taylor Quartet - Southport Weekender 98 - still in my top 3 gigs of all time. youtu.be/3MAUFNX6ZxQ?si… RIP Roy 🎼

Great to see the coverage work of the planning data team esp Paul Downey at MHCLG and the incubator for ai gov.uk/government/n... worth noting that this kind of work is only possible with well designed data standards and human focused content-designed guidance to guide the ai.

(New) New Towns are pure nerdgasm for me. Learning from my Thames Gateway days and getting excited about the potential opportunities for focusing cross-gov digital activity. Also a nice way to get people excited about the long term vision. Some words...tpximpact.com/knowledge-hub/…

Kicking off TPXimpact | B Corp™ session on New New Towns #ukreiif

“New New Towns is a great opportunity to demonstrate mission-led government” says Ellie De La Bedoyoure from MHCLG #ukreiif

James Scott from Urban and Civic talking about how we need digitisation of data to help enable new technology - from a process perspective but also enabling eg self-driving cars

Wei Yang talking about need to excite future generations about the New Towns programme as it’s for them

Sophie White from Aviva Capital talking about how government and industry need to collaborate to help design solutions to underwrite funding

What a week. Cracking open a beer and going to finish a blogpost about central/local data and read the 10 year infrastructure strategy, as inconsiderately Tom Forth hasn’t been on a long train journey with beer in the last few days to summarise it for me.

The last successful planning application for a reservoir was submitted in 1976 As late as the 1960s Britain typically opened 3 reservoirs a year. bbc.co.uk/news/articles/…