| Topic: | Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Re:Wonky “illegal” car park to get planning permission | |
| Posted by: | Adam Beamish | |
| Date/Time: | 09/01/21 17:13:00 |
| You say that David, but there's a significant proportion of local authority officers who, at some point after working in the public sector for some time, go and work for developers or planning consultancies acting on behalf of developers. I've both worked alongside and had dealings with many enforcement officers in my time. I won't disagree that some fit your description. But the majority don't. I've employed people in enforcement roles who don't have planning backgrounds who turned out to be excellent. It does also take a certain type of person to excel in planning enforcement, nothing to do with qualifications or abilities but in terms of personal attributes - I often compare it to how most goalkeepers in football are abit 'mad'. In blunt terms enforcement officers are going to take alot of s**t from people and it is a dangerous job, no-one ever really appreciates what you do, and yet the salaries are usually poorer than a planning officer who is only dealing with planning applications. So unfortunately fewer and fewer young graduates are keen to take enforcement jobs, or do so and then move sideways into a planning officer role within 12-18 months. What I will say is that in my experience, whilst I left uni after a 3 year planning degree and an additional 1 year postgraduate diploma in town planning, during those 4 years at uni the only module where we really focused upon the fundamentals of planning legislation was, ironically enough, planning enforcement. Certainly whilst I left uni with a degree and a postgraduate diploma in planning, I didn't have an in-depth knowledge of planning legislation. For me, just as in my personal life, it's always been a case of taking every opportunity that came my way with abit of luck/risk taking thrown in. And whilst I can't ever imagine returning to the public sector, I'll always credit the 10 years I spent as a local government officer specialising in enforcement as providing the foundations upon which I have subsequently built a career in the private sector, both for major housebuilders and multinational consultancies, and for several years now my own consultancy. |