Only Plans.
Plan making, from the inside.
The gap between how Local Plans are supposed to work and how they actually get made is where most of the important decisions happen. Only Plans examines how spatial strategy actually takes shape: the evidence, the trade-offs, the timing and the judgements that sit just beneath the surface of what plans say and what they allocate.
It is written for developers, landowners, planning agents and local planning authorities who want to shape what the system delivers, not just move through it. For those in the private sector, understanding how an emerging plan is actually being made is usually the difference between getting ahead of it and catching up. For authorities at the start of a plan making programme, it tells you what the process actually involves and where the decisions that matter most really get made.
Strategic sites sit at the heart of that analysis. How an emerging Local Plan treats a major development area, how infrastructure and viability considerations shape what is actually deliverable, and how spatial strategy is constructed and tested at examination are questions that run through the blog from the beginning.
Some posts explore plan making ideas and strategy. Others examine the practical realities of getting plans from inception to examination. All of them are written on the assumption that the reader wants to understand the system well enough to shape what it produces.