Emily had the pleasure of both attending and speaking at the Young Planners Conference 2025, hosted by the RTPI London Young Planners at London South Bank University.
The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Planning for Good Health’, providing a wide range of topics to explore within town planning.
Day 1 focused on placing health at the starting point of planning and working strategically across the entire sector to achieve better outcomes.
In the first panel ‘Building Healthier Futures: The Impact of Planning and Transport’ Michael Chang highlighted the importance of working strategically across sectors and the need for a meaningful Health Impact Assessment process. Dr Sophie Elsmore presented research on the impacts of embedding health and planning roles within council departments. Steve Quartermain highlighted that health had been integral to planning since 1909, and the need to rethink process, rather than just policy, to implement health outcomes.
The ‘Urban Design for Healthy Places’ panel brought together wider issues around safe and equitable access to spaces, from humanising infrastructure design and integrating stewardship into new communities. Amy Tempest demonstrated how TfL were planning for safer routes for women and girls, including methods like undertaking the active travel zone assessments at night to understand how these are perceived in the dark. Annie Gingell launched the Planning for Neurodiversity Design Booklet from the Neurodiversity in Planning Network.
The breakout session on 'Planning for Modern Healthcare Facilities' brought together the capital H planning for Health with the lower-case health, with more holistic methods to create healthy communities, from travel routes and landscaping around facilities. It was a great opportunity to gain more understanding on the NHS approach to planning and growth, as well as discussing the potential for more health facilities within high street regeneration.
The first day finished with a walking tour around Elephant and Castle, looking at the regeneration across this area of South East London, from the demolition of the Heygate Estate and the Elephant shopping centre, to the spaces that have come out for meanwhile use, luxury flats, student accommodation and green spaces, and discussing what councils have learnt and changed in future estate regeneration projects since.
Day 2 started with a keynote talk from Professor Ben Clifford on the 'Deregulation of the planning system' and the quality of accommodation brought forth by Class MA conversions. Whilst acknowledging the issues of the limited conditions for Class MA, there is a need for speeding housing delivery and repurposing under-utilised stock. There could be more done in the legislation to deliver better quality units across the country.
Nick Grant and Graeme Keen KC of Landmark Chambers provided a legal overview of key cases that have and continue to impact recent decisions.
Emily facilitated an interactive workshop on Sensory Built Environments with Neurodiversity in Planning for the breakout session and received great feedback from attendees who enjoyed working collaboratively and coming up with new proposals for sites across a range of briefs.
The conference ended with a talk on Plan-making for healthy cities and streets with LB Newham principal policy planner Naomi Pomfret and senior strategist for public health Hafsa Elmi, discussing the ways in which the Draft Local Plan for Newham integrated health across each policy objective and introduced ‘Social Value – Health Impact Assessments’. This was a great way to round up the discussions across the two days, bringing together several themes from the conference in a live example of joined up, strategic and collaborative work to really embed local knowledge and create local solutions.
The conference demonstrated the scope and learnings for councils, developers, consultants and communities to work together and embed quality place making and sustainable communities at the start of the planning process.
