Victoria Hills is the chief executive of the Royal Town Planning Institute, which represents 25,500 town planners in 80 countries. She shares a day at the end of October in the final stretch for the response to the planning white paper, with a Hawaiian beach walk and a woodland ramble.
I start today much as I start every other day – at 6am, being jumped on in bed by the kids. The novelty of mummy being home a lot during lockdown hasn’t worn off yet. After a quick cup of tea in bed (oh, the luxury!) I escape to my treadmill in the summer house at the end of the garden.
I quit my gym membership this summer and invested in a decent piece of equipment that transports me to various parts of the globe, including my favourite start to the day, a beach walk in Hawaii.
After getting the kids off to school, it’s straight onto a quarterly catch-up meeting with Fiona Howie, chief executive of the Town and Country Planning Association. My job is diverse and varied. I love the nuts and bolts of running a charity. But being a female chief executive can be quite a lonely path, so it’s great to have peers to lean on, swapping notes on the planning white paper.
This week has been particularly busy, as we finesse our final lines on the RTPI’s submission to the Planning for the Future white paper. After 12 weeks of consultation, engagement and discussion on how best to respond to this proposed shake-up of the planning system, I think we’re nearly there. Just one last meeting with public affairs, policy and communications and we will have nailed it.
With such a broad church of members, 25,500 planners, nearly half and half public and private practice, it’s been a bit of a tightrope to navigate. But we have had a lot of fun in the process and the proof will be, as they say, in the pudding.
We are very much holding the government’s feet to the fire over how they are going to support planning services to enable a green recovery. Plans for zoning and a single flat-rate levy are too simplistic – we want to see more joined-up strategies for climate action, substantial increases to affordable housing subsidy to ease the squeeze on infrastructure levy and have repeated calls for a £500m injection to adequately resource local planning authorities. Planning is the gateway to construction and we need to harness its potential.
One advantage of not having to travel anywhere is that I can pack more into my diary. At midday, I’m straight into a panel presentation with Localis, chaired by its chief executive Jonathan Werran, explaining why there is a bright future for community planning, provided it is sufficiently funded.
It leads to an interesting debate, which leaves many questions unanswered – perhaps something of a theme for the white paper. Then, I’m straight into a one-to-one with one of my directors. Lockdown sees me talking more regularly with my team to ensure we stay joined up and support each other, much more so than when I used to race around a bit more.
At 1pm I break for lunch and after a quick bite to eat it’s time to honour my latest twitter challenge – #25MinutesOutsideEverydayFor30Days – for mental health awareness and winter wellbeing. I’m lucky to have Epping Forest nearby and it’s a beautiful day for a quick walk around this ancient woodland.
Within an hour, I’m back at my desk for a meeting with my president Sue Manns and vice president Wei Yang to discuss the arrangements for the RTPI January 2021 presidential inauguration. The extended lockdown means we will have to pre-record the event in a socially distanced way and then premiere on our YouTube channel. Much like 2020, the outlook for 2021 is a little unpredictable, which makes our planning a challenge. Nevertheless, being planners we won’t be defeated and we’ll plough ahead, albeit in a digital sense.
After a quick cup of tea, it’s time for a meeting with my senior team to prepare our 2021 budget. As you can imagine this makes for a rather interesting conversation – but we are determined to be calling the shots next year and studiously plot our strategy to be one step ahead.
My final meeting of the day is at 4.30pm with the newly appointed chair of the government’s new Design Steering Group, Nicholas Boys Smith. We talk about the emphasis of quality design in the planning white paper and what lays ahead, establishing a new national design body.
After an attempt to catch up on e-mails, I check in on the family and then prepare for my most competitive appointment of the day, my beginners’ tennis group lesson. Being at home more has its advantages, but I can’t wait to get out and about to do what I love doing best – stakeholder engagement, public speaking and networking. Finally, I check in on my social media and then try to get an early night, before doing it all over again tomorrow.
