TCPA chief joins Cratus: planning risk and engagement lessons for project teams
Reviewed by Joe Ashwell
First reported on The Construction Index
30 Second Briefing
Fiona Howie, former chief executive of the Town and Country Planning Association and ex-senior leader at Campaign for National Parks and CPRE, has joined Cratus Group as director of communities and placemaking. She will lead long-term engagement on complex schemes including new communities, urban extensions, estate regeneration, town centre regeneration and major consultation programmes, where planning risk often hinges on local trust. Cratus’ planning and communities teams specialise in pre-application consultations and multi-year stakeholder engagement for large-scale projects such as residential estates, solar farms and proposed new towns.
Technical Brief
- Role is embedded within Cratus’ communities and placemaking team, not its planning applications team.
- Cratus’ remit explicitly spans residential estates, solar farms and proposed new towns as core project types.
- Long-term engagement brief covers both brownfield estate regeneration and greenfield urban extensions in parallel.
- Strategic communications scope includes statutory and non-statutory public consultation around major planning submissions.
- Stakeholder mapping will typically include local authorities, community groups, infrastructure owners and major landowners.
Our Take
Cratus Group’s UK base means this move sits within a cluster of Infrastructure pieces where planning expertise is increasingly treated as a strategic asset for navigating local authority processes, rather than as a purely regulatory or campaigning function.
For UK Projects-tagged coverage, most items focus on delivery risk and funding; bringing in someone with Campaign for National Parks and CPRE experience suggests clients are likely to lean more on Cratus for early-stage site selection, landscape impact and stakeholder positioning before formal applications are lodged.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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