Our Diary

Our Diary2025-03-18T11:35:56+00:00

Our Diary

The ‘Agenda’ listing here is the same as that shown elsewhere on this site. Scroll through events with the large next/previous arrows. Hover your mouse over the month grid [touch dots on mobiles] for event details. 

March 2025

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Latest News

Culture funding

20th March 2025|Tags: , |

The DCMS £270m ‘Arts Everywhere Fund’ includes £15m for repairing Heritage at Risk and a new £4.85m Heritage Revival Fund. There is also an £85m ‘Creative Foundations Fund’ for capital works to venues, £25m for capital works to museums via the ‘Museum Estate and Development Fund’, £120m for capital works to DCMS-sponsored bodies via the ‘Public Bodies Infrastructure Fund’, and £3.2m for cultural education including the ‘Heritage Schools Programme’.

Infrastructure Strategy

19th March 2025|Tags: , |

The Government has set out its working paper for developing a 10 Year Infrastructure Strategy which seeks to bring together a plan for the country’s social, economic and housing infrastructure. The Strategy will also describe an institutional framework to support its implementation, including setting out the role of public financial institutions and how the Strategy will support other strategies, such as the industrial strategy.

The new London Plan: Shaping housing for the future

15th March 2025|Tags: , , , |

This London Forum/London Society joint event is scheduled for April 23rd; there are only a few tickets now left.

The event will leave us all much better informed about the shape of the next ten years.  Free for London Forum members, but booking is essential

Please book now if you’d like to attend, details of the speakers, venue, time etc are on the event page here:  https://www.londonforum.org.uk/events/the-new-london-plan-shaping-housing-for-the-future

Green Belt

14th March 2025|Tags: , , |

Guidance on reviewing Green Belt and identifying grey belt sites has been published. It will inform determination of applications for proposals utilising grey belt land and whether development of the site would be sustainable and the effect on the remaining Green Belt. There are ‘golden rules’ both within that guidance and in other guidance here for consideration of viability.

Slow build-out rates

13th March 2025|Tags: , |

According to the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) here, the government should explore measures to tackle “unproductive land speculation” and slow build-out rates by developers of permitted residential sites, rather than blaming the planning system and ‘red tape’ for the housing crisis. 

Latest Insights

What’s Happening to London’s Population?

19th March 2025|Tags: , , |

London-population-density-map 2020 Population density map 2020

An Historical Introduction

London’s population peaked in the 1930s, reaching about 8.6 million in 1939. For the next half century it fell steadily, to 6.8 million in the 1980s, before beginning to rise again, to over 9.1 million now. But the experiences of inner London (broadly, the area governed by the London County Council (LCC) from 1889 to 1963) [more…]

Great British Railways consultation launched

18th March 2025|Tags: |

Great British Railways GBR logo – there are several proposed versions

The government has at last launched a formal consultation on the creation of Great British Railways (GBR), several years after the launch of the Williams Review in 2018 that ended up as the Williams-Shapps report in 2021 recommending a GBR.

Although the previous Conservative governments gave oral support to [more…]

Balancing quality and quantity to deliver 1.5m homes

3rd March 2025|Tags: |

Ben DerbyshireThis article was first published in Housing Today.

The government – and housebuilders – must be given the best possible chance of achieving its ambitious target writes Ben Derbyshire

Nobody wants new homes built nearby because what housebuilders do looks horrible and inevitably overwhelms local infrastructure – right? Well, hold on. How else can the government achieve its target of a million [more…]