The UK faces profound challenges around our climate, housing, health and infrastructure. Coinciding is how we tackle them in a way that promotes equality and fairness across our country, with chronic local government underfunding meaning authorities are already facing significant funding and capacity shortfalls, which in turn has created a distrust in our politicians and the development industry.  All of the this is weighing down on investment into our nation and disenfranchising our future generations.

Prior + Partners believe that now is the time to plan with purpose and confidence in our future. This requires working with Central Government, Public and Private Sectors alike to shape a national response that centres big, bold and ambitious plans, bringing together planning, economics and design.

For us, thinking big and radically is what allows for bold, transformative solutions that go beyond incremental adjustments to existing systems. These are often insufficient to tackle large-scale, complex problems.  Radical plans can drive rapid, disruptive progress by reimagining from the ground up.  So, what might these new big plans include? We ask:

What if …

• Advocate a more exploratory approach to urban planning, leveraging foresight tools and cutting-edge technology and data science to envision the future;
• Advocate moving away from over-reliance on historical data toward scenario-based visioning combined with agile medium-term planning and execution;
• Encourage politicians and decision makers to make bold plans;
• Consider long-term impacts of decisions on future generations.

• Implement a national plan to drive strategic, cross-authority planning;
• Enable cities and regions to plan spatially their response to national and local opportunities and challenges;
• Advocate for a strategic review of the Green Belt that appraises its current and future function, role, purpose and potential;
• Plan for timely social and strategic infrastructure delivery at an appropriate scale to enable sustainable growth.

• Put minimum healthy life expectancy on a similar footing to carbon targeting;
• Put public health back at the heart of the planning system to address health inequalities;
• Have much better data and evidence, specific to a place, to ensure effective intervention;
• Use spatial planning to prioritise public health and reduce pressure on the NHS.

• Empower passionate, imaginative and young minds to take the lead in shaping bold, aspirational visions of the future, providing fresh thinking;
• Harness the wisdom and guidance of more experienced professionals providing analytical rigor and pragmatic realism.

• Invest boldly in infrastructure to unlock long-term economic benefit, which currently fall by the wayside of short-term political cycles;
• Overcame ineffective and inefficient competitive bidding for funding;
• Allow capital for longer time horizons and tolerance for delayed returns, understanding how crucial this is for ambitious, transformative projects that may take decades to fully realise their impact;
• Match funds with clear evidence of infrastructure needs and priorities;
• Transcend partisan politics and ensure an inclusive, participatory democratic process.

A call to action!

If you’re ready to voice brave new ideas and think rebelliously, we want to hear from you. Together, we can generate a manifesto for the incoming government to transform the UK.  We plan to come together over the summer.  Contact us at weneedaplan@priorpartners.com to get involved.