RTPI London Planning Awards for Excellence - Ceremony

Charlie Banner (Lord Banner KC) was called to the Bar of England & Wales in 2004, to the Bar of Northern Ireland in 2010 and was appointed Queen’s Counsel in 2019. Since 2024, he has been a Working Peer in the House of Lords, in which capacity he sits as a legislator in the upper house of the UK Parliament. Charlie has a heavyweight domestic and international practice at Keating Chambers, with a particular focus on planning law. He is recommended in Band 1 for Planning in Chambers & Partners UK Bar, and was voted one of the Top 2 planning silks in Great Britain in the 2024 edition of Planning Magazine’s annual Planning Legal Survey. Projects he has recently worked on range from 800 dwellings in the Green Belt, several tall buildings schemes in Milton Keynes and Bristol, the two leading cases on the flood risk sequential test (Mead and Yatton), CG Fry in the Supreme Court on nutrient neutrality, Hillside in the Supreme Court on overlapping planning permissions, a new stadium in Belfast, a £9bn data centre project and a new theme park. In 2024, he led the Independent Review of Legal Challenges to Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, the recommendations of which are now included in the Planning and Infrastructure Bill.

Dentons UKI planning team sits within our 200+ strong UKI real estate practice working from five offices across the UK and Ireland.  We are ranked as one of the UK's leading planning law practices in the Legal 500 and Chambers Directories. We are known for expertise in large-scale housing and mixed-use regeneration projects, CPO and infrastructure advice.  The range, complexity and profile of work – for national and local Government, developers, investors and infrastructure providers – stands out.  Our point of difference is the balance of advising both Government and investors on all areas of planning law.

This gives us a different perspective and helps drive our reputation for finding solutions and remaining at the forefront of legal innovation.  Our working culture - focussed on building consensus and solving problems within project teams and with counterparties - is distinctive.  We believe our values – brevity, integrity, innovation and common sense – are recognised as helping us to drive success for our clients.

At Howden, we pride ourselves on being a broker with a difference, combining the knowledge of a specialist broker, the agility of a start-up, and the scale and experience of an established international business. Since the beginning, our founders wanted Howden to be a business we all feel proud of so from individual volunteering to product innovation, we are working to make a positive impact.

We have over 28 years of experience and expertise in providing Professional Indemnity Insurance solutions for Planning Consultants and provide risk management advice and broking services to clients ranging from sole traders through to large multi-office firms.

Vistry Group is a top 5 housebuilder with a purpose to develop sustainable new homes and communities across all sectors of the UK housing market.  Vistry do this with an ethos of doing the right thing across all operations, and with our people acting by our values of integrity, caring and quality.

Vistry Group is uniquely positioned to lead the way in the UK housing market with a countercyclical business model featuring Vistry Housebuilding and Vistry Partnerships which combines both partner delivery and development-led capabilities and has a hard-earned reputation for delivery, quality and sector knowledge across all housing tenures.