Council planners are the most understaffed, underpaid, overworked, abused and depressed workers in Britain, which is a cause for concern because they are responsible for creating and determining the quality of environments we live in, according to a panel of experts at the Hay festival.
“The average chief planning officer earns the same salary as a Tesco bakery manager and has done for the past 15 years,” Kevin McCloud, the presenter of Channel 4’s Grand Designs, told an audience at the literary festival in Wales.
“The difference is that Tesco has a full complement of bakery managers, whereas across the country our planning departments roughly operate at 50% of what they should be doing, especially after the cuts ... they were a soft target.”
McCloud was sharing a stage with the sustainable development entrepreneur Solitaire Townsend and Juliet Davenport, the founder of the company Good Energy.
Townsend said she had spent a month in a UK planning department and “it was the tiniest, most understaffed, most underfunded, most depressed group of people I have ever worked with”.
Davenport, who once shared office space with Wiltshire county council planners, said: “I always remember one poor girl, she was almost weeping on a daily basis because she was being shouted at constantly.
“We should have a bit more sympathy with the planners ... they are so underfunded, they are undertrained, under-equipped to do the job they need to do. Everybody is going to shout at them if they get it wrong.”
All this was important, McCloud said, because these people play such a big role in creating quality environments.
“Apart from train drivers, they are one of the most responsible jobs in the world. They are hugely important and yet we don’t value them. They’ve had seven years of training and they are so underpaid and poorly respected. We all want to give them a hard time.”
He said it was normally a junior member of the department saying no to planning applications because that was quicker and easier than saying yes.
The session, titled Small is Beautiful ... Or is it Anymore, was one of a cluster of events that were part of the Hay on Earth Forum exploring food supply and energy production.
McCloud also said the UK would be a lot better off if there were a return to council house building on the scale of the 1950s, and that people should spend less time on their phones.
“What we should all be doing is putting down our laptops, getting off the social media; we should stop tweeting and we should all go and hug our neighbours,” he said.