Ahead of their involvement in our Planning and Land Development Conference we’ve been speaking to Strategic Land Group. Their Managing Director Paul Smith has shared his views on the planning process and overcoming barriers…

Q. How does Strategic Land Group (SLG) help landowners through the planning process?

SLG is a land promoter – we work with landowners to secure planning permission on their sites at our cost and risk. Our return is a share of the value of the site once it’s sold –  if we don’t succeed, it doesn’t cost the landowner anything.

Whether we succeed or fail can be genuinely life-changing for our landowner partners, so making sure we offer an extremely high-quality service is really important to us. That means we don’t want to get too big – we want to pick about 20 to 30 sites that we really believe in. At that scale, we can make sure every project gets the care and attention it deserves.

Q. What are some of the biggest obstacles in getting development through the planning system and how can they be mitigated?

The main challenge is the unpredictability of the planning system. The local plan process is often protracted and is prone to changes in political direction – both at national and local level. Decision-making can also be erratic, with councillors seemingly ever-more willing to go against the advice of their officers.

We manage that by making sure our proposals are high quality. That means making sure our schemes are well-designed, but also that the technical information the supports them is robust. Attention to detail is particularly important – the strongest looking proposal can fall down on what seems like the tiniest detail.

Finally – and as far as possible – we look to work with local councils. We try and avoid the appeal system where we can, and would much rather search for compromises that can help the council support our proposals.

Q. Strategic Land Group also focuses on bringing forward difficult sites for development, how do you enable development on riskier sites?

Although I’m now a chartered town planner, my background is actually in house building – at the start of my career, almost every site I dealt with was brownfield with some degree of technical complexity. That helps us take on sites where planning might be less of a challenge, but where there are a range of technical issues that need resolving. That could be anything from peculiar land ownership issues, devising complex remediation strategies or securing access or drainage rights.

Q. What are some of your most anticipated sites that are being brought forward for development due to your expert support?

Of our current projects, I think the one we are most proud of is in Stoke-on-Trent – a 30-acre greenfield site on the edge of the city. When we agreed to work with the landowners, I think lots of people thought we were making a mistake – the housing market in the city doesn’t have the best reputation. But I was confident it was a project that we could make a success.

Through working closely with the council, we produced an extremely high-quality design that delivered a fantastic new park for that part of the city. We eventually secured an outline planning permission for 350 homes, which established a number of design principles that needed to be followed when a detailed scheme was prepared.

We’ve just sold the first phase of 169 homes to Persimmon. Their planning permission was approved unanimously at planning committee and local councillors were hugely complimentary of the quality of the scheme – which all stemmed from those original principles that we had established.

The result, then, was a happy landowner, a happy developer and a happy council.

Q. What is Strategic Land Group most looking forward to at the Planning & Land Development Conference?

The quality and range of speakers – I’m always keen to hear as wide a range of views as possible,  particularly from people who I think I might not agree with. That’s the best way of challenging your own assumptions and prejudices, which is, after all, the only way you learn and get better.

You can register for the Planning and Land Development Conference here: https://www.built-environment-networking.com/event/the-planning-development-conference/