What are the main challenges and opportunities for planning in your region?

As my experience as part of planning commission working at public policies in Brazil during the past four years, the members choice should be balanced with a god list of local entrepreneurs, non profit organizations, and others with knowledge of the objective. A good council will also need some outside partner able to design along with government and society representatives the master lines of the planning path. Planning government policies is successful when all get involved in thinking.

The biggest problem I find commissioning in a live site is working around the client's schedule and trying to fit every party into a date that works for everyone. I can have a solid commissioning plan, detailed to the n-th degree, but if all the relating jobs are not finished by a specific day everything must be rearranged, and this happens a lot of the times. In this case permits have to be reissued and for some international clients this means 30-45 days delays.

A comprehensive plan works only on paper. Every 2-3 years the local and national laws and or regulations are "updated" rendering a lot of the previous hard work useless. In this case the first action has always been to apply for an extension, an exemption or to find your way around it. In a few of my sites things were fine until other service providers built their facilities across the street from us. This adds to the environmental issues we might encounter say in case of a power outage. Instead of having 36 generators at 1.5MW each running, we have 150+ gens. The earlier plans we had for expansion become trickier as the local authorities become shy about more built-ups, power and water usage.

This is an absolute lie. I live in Richmond upon Thames and the local brewery has been scheduled to become a housing complex. This would cause extreme traffic and delays, pollution and all sort of other issues to the community, hence almost 100% of local population in Mortlake is against it. ... The council has given the go ahead to it. The same has been for extra 5G towers in the area. Let us not lie to ourselves and others by saying that we as citizens have any sort of say in what the local or national governments decide. Let's not go with What I have seen in central London, or even Slough councils.