The following article written by Michael Hardware has been published in Placemaking Resource, part of Planning magazine. The article can be viewed on this link (registration required).     By Michael Hardware, Chelgate’s director of planning and property. He is also a serving county and district councillor. Several counties have seen the emergence of developer groups in recent years. These should not be confused with developer forums which tend to focus on individual plan areas. Developer groups cover a county, appealing to housebuilders, developers and their consultants which operate there. They also work in partnership with Local Enterprise Partnerships, county […]

The starting pistol on planning reform has been fired: the Government has today published a White Paper “Planning for the Future” for consultation. This coupled with the reform of local government potentially heralds a period of massive change for local government and developers in the coming years.   The White Paper proposes to simplify the planning system, making it quicker, more democratic and leading to more homes being built; the target is 300,000 per annum, a million new homes during the life of the present government. Planning consultants will be pouring over the detail of the White Paper, reporting on […]

Town and county halls across the country are in a state of near panic as plans are brought forward by the Government for a major restructuring of local government. This would see the abolition of county, district, borough and some city councils to be replaced by unitary authorities and elected mayors.   Although a commitment in the 2019 General Election manifesto, most thought it was unlikely these radical changes would be implemented, especially given the Covid 19 crisis. But Dominic Cummings has had other ideas. What is planned? This will be the biggest change in local government for decades, and […]

Inspectors have written to at least two authorities in Essex with unadopted local plans asking them to review their housing need numbers. This follows publication of the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) 2018 household projections.   The figures, published on 29th June, predict the number of households in England to grow on average by 149,960 per year over the next 25 years. This is a lower rate of growth than anticipated by ONS’s 2016 and 2014 publications. The Inspector examining Epping Forest District Council’s Local Plan wrote to the council on 16th July. In her letter she recommended that […]

The Covid-19 pandemic, which has sparked an unprecedented surge in conspiracy theories, has shown us the real challenges of trying to tackle false narratives in emergency, or “wartime” situations. The sheer number, availability, and complexity of some stories are hard to comprehend. For instance, as Chelgate’s Terence Fane-Saunders pointed out in the latest episode of Opinion Battlegrounds, videos by some 5G conspiracy theorists are receiving hundreds of thousands of views. Moreover, at one stage “46,000 tweets linked to Covid-19 misinformation were published every single day”. With these facts in mind, it’s easy to see social media as a kind of […]

Transcript of “Opinion Battlegrounds” Podcast By Chelgate Chairman, Terence Fane-Saunders   Welcome back to Opinion Battlegrounds. My name’s Terence Fane-Saunders , and I’m Executive Chairman of Chelgate Ltd – an international strategic PR firm specializing in Issues and Crisis Management. Usually I’m joined for these podcasts by one or two friends and colleagues, but the challenges of this virus lockdown mean that I will be flying solo for a while, talking to you from my remote self-imposed isolation here high up in the North York Moors. If you have joined us before, you’ll know what this is about. We look […]

  In late March, as Covid-19 swept through Europe like a medieval plague, throwing country after country into a disarray not seen in almost a century, a strange – but not so surprising – phenomenon occurred. News outlets all over the world, egged on by gushing social media influencers, reported that cities were being reclaimed by wild animals. In Venice, dolphins and swans were spotted swimming through the canals. In India, newly emboldened elephants were photographed drinking corn wine and then sleepily recuperating in a farmer’s field. Soon the Edenic images, which were circulated by millions of people, became a […]

Michael Hardware, Director of Planning and Property at Chelgate Local, has published an in PlacemakingResource on 30th March titled The Show Must Go On discussing virtual planning meetings.  You can read the article below or using this link (subscription required).     The development industry is pulling together so work can continue during the coronavirus restrictions. Efforts are being made to ensure the disruption caused to the housing supply is not too dramatic. That said, the industry, like almost all others, has been severely impacted. That impact may lessen as we settle into our new ways of working and realise what […]

  Like any landscape, social media is full of potential friends, antagonists, and personalities that lie somewhere in-between. Normally there’s nothing to worry about. Posting an article or commenting on a link is like walking along a Hawaiian beach: you might step on a rock or shell, but most of the time you’ll just feel the warmth of the sand beneath your feet. Of course, when it comes to the management of your or your company’s online reputation, things are much more consequential. Given the hyperspeed with which masses of users tend to distort and disseminate information, a rumour, insinuation, […]

Social media, despite its blessings of connectivity and information-sharing, has also created a never-ending torrent of new problems and issues. Cruising through the rough seas of Twitter and Facebook can sometimes seem like a Sisyphean task. You send out a well-meaning message, only to be shouted down and condemned by angry strangers. You reply to a post and trolls – like hydra heads – rise up to sink in their fangs. Why all the negativity? Is everyone really out for blood or do threads and feeds just bring out our inner werewolf? According to a recent study by University of […]