In the first two quotations, the former Deputy Prime Minister John Prescott raises a number of interesting ideas: that the planning system was an important part of the postwar British welfare state; that the New Labour government in Britain saw this public service as in need of reform when it came to power; and that the Labour administration was determined to reform planning. And yet Prescott also implies that this reform was somehow a simple process, that the planning system had become ‘inefficient’, ‘and so we embarked on a major programme of planning reform.’ In fact, as this book will...

We saw in Chapter One that both the planning system and the wider public sector context in which British planning is situated have been the objects of concerted reform over the last 15 years in central and devolved government in Great Britain. Hull sums up the reforms thus:

Public service provision has been slowly re-configured since the early 1980s by the introduction of ‘market’ measures of efficiency. So far, the ‘hard’ infrastructure of the planning system has remained relatively unscathed from the privatisation of services and State assets….The main changes have been to the ‘soft’ infrastructure of the planning system;...

The British planning system essentially comprises of a tripartite administrative arrangement, between the political, the judicial and the professional (Regan, 1978). The professional component rests on the assumption that planning is a technical and rational activity, involving the development and application of policies by qualified planning professionals and the deployment of skills gained through formal education and training. Indeed in Britain, membership of the planners’ professional organisation, the RTPI, is only awarded to an individual following the successful completion of an accredited university programme, a period in planning practice and peer group assessment of credentials.

The judicial component features the...

Although the key underlying principles of the British planning system have remained static since 1947, namely LPAs formulating some sort of plan envisaging policies to manage land use in their areas 15-20 years into the future and then determining applications against these plans and other ‘material considerations’ (Allmendinger, 2011), there have been some concerted efforts to reform the scope of, and process for preparing, plans since the turn of the century. Naturally these process reforms have captured the attention of practitioners and academics alike, as they cut to the heart of planning practice. The most notable reform over the last...

Just as the growth of local spatial planning, examined in Chapter Four, has been the major reform for policy planners, so the growth of auditing and targets appears to have been the major reform facing development control planners over the last decade. Michael was quite clear on the impact of targets for his professional life:

“Yes, well they’ve had a very, very significant effect on the job, there’s no question. I mean if I had to say, if I had to say the most significant impact on the last six years for me, it has been the targets.”

This comment...

During the research on New Labour and planning reform, the topic of public participation cropped up in conversation.¹ “Ah”, said the planner, “when I was doing my planning course we had a Canadian planner come to chat to us, as they were ahead of us in terms of public participation in those days. He told us how terrible it was, that the only thing they could get done was plant trees, because nobody objected to that, and that seems to me a danger of where we are headed in this country.” The planner then smiled wryly before adding, “well actually...

In a series of articles spanning the 1970s into the 1990s and 2000s, Wildavsky (1972), Reade (1983), Wadley and Smith (1998), Huxley (1999) and Phelps and Tewdwr-Jones (2008) have considered the questions of what is planning and whether it can be distinguished as a discipline. Aaron Wildavsky set this series in train with perhaps the most critical perspectives of the discipline of planning, whose reputation was restored to some extent in subsequent articles by Reade (1983), Huxley (1999) and Phelps and Tewdwr-Jones (2008). Nevertheless, Reade came to the conclusion that ‘we should regard with considerable scepticism the idea that there...

In this book, we have discussed how we can conceptualise and understand the role of frontline planners, and how those same planners experience the ongoing reforms of planning and the public sectors. As Schofield and Sausman write:

The reality of policy initiatives is experienced by the frontline professionals and public servants who do not generally make up policy elites. If the elite system has no feedback mechanism by which to monitor and access the policy reality, the whole arena of knowledge capture based on experience is lost. (2004, p 245)

The accounts of frontline planners constitute the reality of planning...