Goodbye ‘PlanningMatters’

I was sorry to hear that ‘PlanningMatters’, the RTPI website on which this blog originally appeared (between November 2005 and April 2009) is to close at the end of February.

The website was primarily intended to help planning professionals to obtain on-line CPD. This blog was started as a means of attracting planners to that website, and was available free for the first year after it was launched. The RTPI, in their wisdom, then decided that it should be put behind the ‘pay wall’ (Mr Murdoch wasn’t the first person to think of that particular wheeze), but the blog still remained popular.

However, when Kaplan Hawksmere took over the PlanningMatters website from Echelon Learning (who had done an excellent job in running it for over four years), it was decided that my services could be dispensed with, and so I disappeared from the ether until I re-launched this blog myself last April.

I am trying hard to avoid any sense of schadenfreude, but I felt that the RTPI were making a mistake in dropping Echelon Learning in favour of Kaplan Hawksmere, and that their decision to drop yours truly at the same time was also ill-considered (but then I would say that, wouldn’t I?).

If you know any friends or colleagues who have been subscribers to PlanningMatters but who have still not found out about the re-launch of this blog last year, do let them know that they can still gain access to it on this site.

It is tempting to think in terms of expanding this blog to encompass material of the sort that has hitherto been available on the PlanningMatters website, but it is early days yet and it would require some careful consideration before we race off down that road.

Meanwhile, this blog is safe and independent and I hope it will continue to appear for some considerable time to come.

© MARTIN H GOODALL