Iceni Projects took part in a historic job swap with HM Treasury in the second half of 2015. Iceni’s Associate Planner, Jamie Sullivan, was seconded in to advise on planning and housing reforms whilst HM Treasury’s Planning Policy Advisor, Simon Dilly, moved in the other direction for three months. The job swap is understood to be the first of its kind for HM Treasury. The move helped further strengthen Iceni’s already considerable political insight, whilst providing a key member of the HM Treasury team with development sector experience.
What I learnt at…HM Treasury
When the opportunity to work for HM Treasury came up I jumped at the chance. I’ve carried out a lot of research and analysis of national planning policy issues in the past for organisations such as the National Housing Federation and Policy Exchange, so this secondment was a natural extension to that.
Working for the Treasury was not as much as a culture shock as I expected, although the provision of flexi-time and generous annual leave helped with that. Seriously though I found my new colleagues to be very sharp, hard-working and knowledgeable. A large proportion of their time is spent scrutinising and then refining (or rejecting) new policy ideas from a variety of sources. The ideas that do get initially approved face a long and often tortuous process before they are announced by Government.
The process is collaborative and requires buy-in from a range of different departments and individuals. This leads me on to my two main concerns with the policy making process. First, the collaborative nature leads requires an inordinate number of meetings both internally and externally, to point where it is difficult to contact senior officials by telephone during the day because are always in a meeting. I would say that the nine most commonly used words in Central Government are ‘Let’s sit down and have a chat about this’.
My other concern is the level of bureaucracy involved. I would question whether it is necessary for every single reform to be subject to often unnecessary levels of impact assessments which were built in to serve a political aim. For example, whilst I am all for rigorous policy making but I think senior officials time could spent on better things than carrying out a separate test about the potential impact of Compulsory Purchase Order legislation reforms on families.
Putting this aside, I was impressed with how creative HM Treasury was. The department has significant power and control within the policy making process for planning reforms and despite the fact that there is only a relatively small number of people involved within this process they have been responsible for a significant number of individual reforms.
In terms of what we can expect from the Government in the future; the focus on protecting the Green Belt and promoting brownfield development is not just election rhetoric but forms the basis of their housebuilding strategy. HM Treasury is very keen on deregulation and speeding up the planning process and within No.10 there is also significant focus on the importance of neighbourhood planning. Both HM Treasury and No.10 are also becoming increasingly interested in the delivery of new housing where permission has been granted. Encouragingly there is a general feeling within Central Government that housing has never been so far up the political agenda, so be on the look out for further planning reforms in the near future.
What I learnt at…Iceni Projects
The Treasury is really supportive of staff pursuing secondments (probably because a lot of staff are recent graduates) so I thought I should make the most of that opportunity. My current role is as planning policy adviser for Infrastructure UK within the Treasury and I was keen to get more ‘hands-on’ planning experience. Typically my day to day work at the Treasury involves promoting policy reforms through the system (e.g. the introduction of the Planning Court, compulsory purchase reform, Planning Act 2008 changes) and supporting the Government Top 40 infrastructure projects. I approached Iceni, High Speed 2 and Shelter about a secondment and the fact that Jamie was really interested in coming to HMT as part of a job swap was really appealing, so we went for Iceni.
Iceni’s have a number of teams specialising in different areas such as sustainability, heritage, transport, design, engagement etc. My work was in the strategic team identifying and evaluating suitable land for housing development. I was familiar with some of the issues having worked on reforms with HM Treasury’s Housing and Planning team so I was pleased to get a view from the other side. It was reassuring that my experience at Iceni largely tallied with views within the department; that the allocation of land for housing is far too slow and limited and provides a small number of landowners with large windfalls.
My observations on Iceni were entirely positive; the staff have a great mixture of enthusiasm and professionalism and it was a welcoming environment to ask questions and share knowledge. I picked up various techy bits of knowledge that I am bound to immediately forget!
I enjoyed getting out and about and meeting various clients to discuss government policy, and I was reassured by the quality of debate. I also led a CPD session for staff to introduce the policy making process within HMT. While doing ‘research’ for the presentation, I discovered that in the first episode of ‘Yes Minster’ the very first thing Sir Humphrey briefs the Right Honourable Hacker on is the time it takes to get a bungalow through the planning system. Well some things never change and in the intervening 30 years the process has got significantly slower, albeit more robust in many important ways. I do hope though that an ongoing dialogue with Iceni and industry can help us to develop fresh policy ideas to tackle the problems that we collectively face.
