Commercial Property

Do you think that when the company was created anyone thought of the similarity in the name to a certain John Le Carre character. At least this company and the DCLG are fighting out there differences in the full glare of the courts and not in the labyrinthine realm of the Circus.

Pickles is, as they say, dead but will not lie down. He has announced that the Government will introduce legislation to push on with the abolition of the Regional Strategies. He has also announced that taking that into consideration the planners and the Inspectorate should bear his comments in mind.  See his letter of the 10th November to Chief Planning Officers.

I was recently at an interesting discussion on the potential use of mediation on town and country planning matters. The initial reaction, of the majority of the town and country planners, both in the private sector and the public sector, was that the idea was interesting but that they could not see how that process would easily fit into the system.

That issue is not the main point of this blog which is Cala. What Pickles hopes is that the professionals will ignore Cala and forget regional Strategies. From what I gathered that is unlikely to happen. Several of those present had appeals going on where the submissions had been drafted excluding reference to the Strategies and where that there is now a frantic rewrite. Whilst I can understand what Pickles is driving at it is strange, to a lawyer, to suggest that people should forget what the law says because the law should change.  What happens if the law does not change or the government changes its mind on its planning reforms? That would be good as  for the majority of what they propose but I doubt will happen.  Apart from that, I think a lot of people will want to revert to the regional Strategies because, for all their faults, a lot of the planning fraternity think they are better than what is proposed.