Pandemic demands speed up planning decisions

The response to the COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in greater changes to providing healthcare real estate than at any point in the NHS’s history, believes Huw Mellor, a Partner at the Oxford offices of multidisciplinary property partnership, Carter Jonas. Here he argues that not only have the changes assisted in responding to the crisis, but they have also shown how planning and development in healthcare, and potentially other public sectors, ‘can be done better’.

The changes, which I will go on to describe in this article, are a significant – but, we believe, proportionate – response to the enormity of the pandemic, and while they have been significant, they have also been immediate. In some cases - unprecedented in the history of planning – change is taking place ahead of the policy that facilitates it. Across the country, we have seen vaccine development centres, hospitals, and specialist clinical facilities, constructed, fitted out, and propelled into operation, as if being viewed on a timelapse video.

In Oxford, Carter Jonas has recently secured planning permission for a significant extension to the John Radcliffe Hospital, but this was no ordinary planning consent, as work on the new building commenced prior to obtaining planning approval. We also experienced similar circumstances in the Vale of White Horse, working closely with the Council to bring about the accelerated construction of the Vaccines Manufacturing and Innovation Centre in Abingdon.