Iain Dale is trying to find conspiracy theories behind the fact that the Lib Dem walk out of Parliament earlier this week didn’t make it onto the front page of the party newspaper, Lib Dem News.

Strangely, there is no mention of Ed Davey’s hissy fit or the LibDem walkout. Do you think they have now realised how ridiculous they made themselves look?

I suspect the answer is rather more prosaic.  The print deadline for Lib Dem News is Tuesday so that the printers can get the publication off the presses, folded, into envelopes and onto the doormats of Lib Dem activists and Iain Dale by Friday.  The walkout probably happened too late in the cycle to make it into this week’s paper.  We’ll know by waiting to see what’s in next week’s edition.  However, it might be such old news by then that it doesn’t feature much.

These are the perils of a weekly periodical. Perhaps he’ll understand better when his own political rag reaches the presses.

Wednesday saw a gala launch of the “Building for Life” scheme in Nottingham, a voluntary code of practice from the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment that encourages house-builders to up their game, and deliver individual excellent schemes of housing rather than boiler-plate plans that could be anywhere.

Building for Life is a set of 20 questions to ask about any new development in the hope of grading it objectively. The list of questions is here, and currently, my favourite is “Do buildings or spaces outperform statutory minima, such as Building Regulations?”  In planning committee, I have been asking this question about sustainable technologies included in buildings from day one.  Since we adopted a form of Merton on all large developments last year, builders have a responsibility to include at least 10% of energy from sustainable sources.  Unfortunately it appears that many are seeing this as a target to be met.  In fact, it’s a minimum.  People should be aiming to do as much as they can, not sticking to the low target.

The launch event in Nottingham was interesting and I’m glad I went.  It was a seminar with a buffet and all sorts of house building practitioners, including development control councillors which is why I was there, then town planning professionals, builders themselves, and architects.

Speeches came from various people, but the most striking was given by the MD of Barratts Homes (who I had met previously at an estate in Chesterfield where they had built houses with solar panels).  I’m not sure he’s terribly used to public speaking but he used his time cleverly, I think.  His speech started off with the planning professional’s bon mot – “good design shouldn’t cost any more” – and asked “any more than what?”  He then proceeded to list every various bit of the policy framework that surrounds housebuilding – every housing act, every change to building regs (there are quite a few in the coming years), every bright idea from a think tank about changing buildings like EcoHomes, PassivHaus, Buildings for Life, Lifetime Homes and so on, every environmental audit like bat studies, flood studies, newt assessments.  He managed to make his list last over ten minutes. He very effectively pointed out that house-building is far from an unregulated activity.

Then we ate and chatted amongst ourselves, answering the seminar question “what are the barriers to good design?”  My input was limited, because it was interesting listening to the planning and housebuilding professionals on my table, but my main point was that of the various schemes that had been shown during the afternoon and lauded as good design, many of them are the sorts of things that loads of people write into the Evening Post about to complain. (Eg The Pod)

Other interesting things I learned:

• 80% of new build in the Midlands in the last few years has been judged as “poor” or “average”, and nearly 40% should never have received planning permission
• an argument could be made that the planning system is the only reason people still live in cities (if you could build on any available acre in the countryside, how many people would prefer to do that than stay in a crowded city – even if it meant a commute?)
• social housing is built to a much higher standard than private housing estates – and yet Joe Public prefers the latter.

So, Harry is “to return home.”

I wonder if that is similar to him “not serving” in the first place.

A colleague reports in a private forum that a 14th Feb by-election is bringing out the love in Preston.

Labour’s leaflets are running with, “On 14th February, say it with roses”

Our leaflets have “Give LibDems a “X” on Valentines Day”

But Respect have gone for a rather unsavoury strapline which hardly trips off the tongue – “Make Valentines Day a Massacre for the mainstream parties”

Whilst queueing Baroness Ros Scott’s piece on last week’s Lords debate on Labour’s plans for greater community engagement, I was moved to read the debate through.

And found this rather wonderful snippet from everyone’s noble friend, Tony Greaves:

[M]y first message for the Government is to ask them, please, to start using plain English. Having read the report we are debating today, I had a vision of someone saying to their husband or wife, “I’m just off down the neighbourhood hub for a bit of community empowerment. We have been quality assured by the national empowerment partnership, and tonight we are embedding our practitioner learning and capturing and sharing it through the national neighbourhood management network”.

Language like this is everywhere and sad to say, all too often, it is there to cloud meaning not to illuminate it. There is nothing less empowering than sitting in a public meeting and having half the content obscured by obfuscation sailing over your head.

Other issues identified in the Lib Dem-led debate were the dangers of residents no longer knowing who to contact to get a decision changed, now that many former powers of government have been removed to distant quangos, and consultation fatigue, where residents have said what it is they want to happen to too many different bodies, and have been put off by the fact that it never actually happens.