EU planners

First steps

If you are qualified as a planner in another EU Member State, you are free to look for planning work in the UK. You can do some of the research suggested here at home in advance. We suggest that you also use holidays, conference visits or short study tours as opportunities to make contacts here.

Finding possible employers

If you would like to work in the public sector in a particular region of Britain, you could consider contacting local authorities (municipalities) in the area. The DirectGov website gives an A-Z list of local authorities, linking straight to most of them. This will quickly give you contact details for local planning departments. The names of UK local authorities do not always correspond to familiar names of towns, cities and counties. This may make searching a little difficult at first. For example, Vale of White Horse is south-west Oxfordshire (towns of Abingdon, Faringdon and Wantage); Dacorum is west Hertfordshire (Berkhamsted and Hemel Hempstead) and so on. London consists of the City of London, the City of Westminster, and 31 other Boroughs from Barking & Dagenham to Wandsworth. Greater Manchester covers ten metropolitan authorities including the cities of Manchester and Salford and the Boroughs of Tameside, Oldham, Bury etc (see the Association of Greater Manchester Authorities website). Maps showing local government boundaries are available from Oultwood and Gwydir.

The RTPI Consultants Directory lists planning consultants in the private sector. Again, you can search this Directory by region or city as well as by name of the organisation. And there is more advice on organisations offering planning jobs in the Careers Section of our website.

Job advertisements

Planning vacancies are advertised every week in Planning, the magazine published in association with the RTPI. A subscription to Planning costs 135 pounds sterling per year sent by airmail to any European country: please write to the subscriptions department at Planning to find out more. The Planning website carries the same job advertising as the journal.

Membership

For an entry-level planning position in a UK organisation, you do not normally need to be a member of the RTPI, but you may find as you progress that employers ask you whether you are a chartered town planner, that is, a member of the RTPI. Suitably qualified planners from other EU Member States can apply to be considered for Chartered Membership under the EU Directive on mutual recognition of higher education qualifications.

The RTPI has now created a new category Associate Membership which may also appeal to people who have qualified in other EU countries. Associate members of the RTPI receive the weekly journal Planning, with its many pages of job advertisements, as part of their subscription. This is substantially less than the journal subscription price. 

Finding out about current planning topics in the UK

For information on aspects of planning which you need to know about before working here, the RTPI Knowledge pages explain the background and link to current topics. RTPI Networks give a professional introduction to key specialist topics such as Urban Design, Transport, Community Planning and International Development.