Public Planning
eBook - ePub

Public Planning

The inter-corporate dimension

John Friend, J. M. Power, C. J. L. Yewlett

Share book
  1. 568 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Public Planning

The inter-corporate dimension

John Friend, J. M. Power, C. J. L. Yewlett

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

Tavistock Press was established as a co-operative venture between the Tavistock Institute and Routledge & Kegan Paul (RKP) in the 1950s to produce a series of major contributions across the social sciences.
This volume is part of a 2001 reissue of a selection of those important works which have since gone out of print, or are difficult to locate. Published by Routledge, 112 volumes in total are being brought together under the name The International Behavioural and Social Sciences Library: Classics from the Tavistock Press.
Reproduced here in facsimile, this volume was originally published in 1974 and is available individually. The collection is also available in a number of themed mini-sets of between 5 and 13 volumes, or as a complete collection.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Public Planning an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Public Planning by John Friend, J. M. Power, C. J. L. Yewlett in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Medicine & Health Care Delivery. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781136445521
Edition
1
Part I Perspectives

1 A field of
public policy

An operational perspective

Interdependence between institutions is a pervasive feature of the structure of all societies. However, these interdependences become especially difficult to deal with in modern societies which must contend with accelerating processes of technical and economic change. Within any such society, there are many different operational perspectives from which the general topic of inter-organizational planning might be explored, including for instance that of advanced technology at one extreme or of alleviation of poverty at the other. The selection of one such perspective as a starting-point for analysis need not of course constrain the focus of subsequent exploration; no system of inter-organizational decision-making can be entirely self-contained, and any analyst of such processes must be prepared to work within an essentially open network, with a rich variety of connections between its component parts.
The perspective which we shall adopt here is that of the management of local and regional change. In this phrase, we mean to cover all powers of decision through which governmental agencies — central, local, or intermediate — can act to influence the distribution of people, wealth, and opportunities between or within some set of geographically defined areas in any national or supernational context. Of course, any working definition of this kind has its imperfections: for instance, the meaning of abstractions such as wealth and opportunity can be exposed to challenge, even though such terms do carry certain generally understood connotations in any society. Another point of challenge, which we shall pass over quickly, is the definition of region. Any sub-division of a country into a set of smaller geographical areas requires the drawing of boundaries which are to some extent arbitrary; and even nations with a federal system of government may find it important for certain purposes to define regional units that violate the administrative boundaries of their component states or provinces. Indeed, it is comparatively rarely that the word 'region' is used to describe an established unit of administration; to that extent, the word itself is an indicator of the difficulty of containing any problems of planning that have a spatial dimension within the territorial bounds of any single administrative agency.
One point at which our initial definition can be more specific is m regarding the management of local and regional change as being a matter of primary concern to public rather than private institutions. Although there may be many non-governmental decision-makers — ranging from the largest international corporation to the most impoverished migrant worker and his family — whose actions will have some influence over the territorial distribution of population, wealth, and opportunity, they are almost invariably motivated by considerations other than the generation of local and regional change as such. Certainly, their actions may combine to generate highly significant changes within and between regions, but any guidance of such changes in accordance with social policies will generally depend on the actions of governmental institutions, whether through the exercise of statutory powers of prohibition or control, through selective local investments or forms of regional incentive, or through periodic public commitments to plans, strategies, or other forms of statement of political intent.

Local and regional change in Great Britain

The case material which we shall use to develop our analysis will be drawn almost exclusively from the context of local and regional change in Great Britain during the nineteen-sixties and early seventies, looking back where necessary to earlier decades but at the same time looking ahead to the later seventies and beyond. In Britain, the processes of local and regional change over this whole period do reflect certain specific national circumstances: in particular, the problems arising in the aftermath of early industrialization and urbanization, and the inheritance of an institutional structure in which most powers of government have for long been divided between a central executive under the control of the national parliament in London, and a set of elected local authorities of differing types and sizes. However, it is hoped that much of what we shall have to say will have equal relevance to the circumstances of other countries, including those whose state of economic development or whose institutional structure may differ significantly from that of Britain.
In Figure 3, recent patterns of population change are indicated for each of the eight regional divisions of England for which advisory Economic Planning Councils were set up in 1964, and also for the separate national units of Scotland and Wales, each treated as a single regional entity. The actual geographical boundaries of these units are indicated on a map which also shows relative population densities in 1971, while the main population changes between censuses of 1951, 1961, and 1971 are set out on a simplified map in which the contiguity of regions has been preserved, but their areas have been distorted to make them proportional to their shares of the total national population.
Although it will be noticed that all population changes have been in an upward direction, the highest rates of increase were registered in the heavily populated South-East region (with London at its centre) and in the four adjoining regions, with much more modest rates of increase in Scotland, Wales, and the three Northern regions of England. By world standards, none of the rates of growth indicated on Figure 3 are particularly high; nevertheless, they do pose some challenging social, political, and environmental problems in an island that combines a high population density with a high level of expectation of material standards of living.
So far as wealth and social opportunity are concerned, almost all available indicators reveal consistent imbalances between the comparatively prosperous South and East and the more economically deprived Northern and Western regions. In particular, levels of unemployment in the North and West have remained consistently higher than those in the South and East, despite attempts by successive governments to counteract these trends through increasingly discriminating policies of regional development. The resulting migrations in search of employment opportunities largely explain the divergences in regional population growth revealed in Figure 3.
However, the most striking redistributions of population in Great Britain have been not so much between regions as within them. By the end of the Second World War in 1945, living conditions in
Figure 3 Regional distribution of population in Great Britain, 1951-71
Figure 3 Regional distribution of population in Great Britain, 1951-71
London and a number of other large cities had deteriorated, through population pressures, war damage, and lack of opportunity to replenish or maintain housing stock, to such a point that planned emigration or 'overspill' of population to less congested areas had become an extremely urgent political priority. To some extent, the resulting dispersal of population is reflected in the broad breakdown of population changes between conurbations, other urban areas, and rural areas as indicated at the foot of Figure 3.
However, the patterns of population change within regions can be illustrated more dramatically by analysing changes in the electorates of parliamentary constituencies between the general elections of 1955 and 1970 — a period over which direct comparisons can be made because no changes in constituency boundaries were introduced. Leaving aside the twelve constituencies of Northern Ireland, the electorates of which were made of abnormally large size for special constitutional reasons, the remaining 618 constituencies of the United Kingdom were defined in 1955 in such a way as to include roughly similar populations within their boundaries, with an average electorate of approximately 55,000, corresponding to a total population of some 80,000. The first frequency chart in Figure 4 shows the distribution of size of electorate about this average in 1955, when the only deliberate inequalities were those introduced in favour of certain comparatively scattered constituencies in thinly populated areas of Scotland and Wales.
By 1970, however, variations in the size of constituencies had become much more marked through migration, as indicated by the much broader scatter of the second distribution in Figure 4. Largely as a result of slum clearance programmes, many of the least populous constituencies were now to be found in the inner areas of London and the four largest provincial cities: Birmingham in the West Midlands, Glasgow in Scotland, and Manchester and Liverpool in the North West. Each of these cities had a population in the range of 600,000 to 1,200,000, and formed the dominant metropolitan centre of a continuous conurbation including several associated urban areas. The third frequency diagram in Figure 4 reveals that it was largely within the eighty-eight constituencies representing these older metropolitan centres that the most significant losses of population were registered over the fifteen years in question.
Figure 4 also shows that a total ol thirteen constituencies registered a net gain of 40,000 electors or more. Significantly, six of these constituencies lay just beyond the boundaries of the London conurbation, and included within their areas the sites of New Towns specially designated by central government to receive 'overspill'
Figure 4 Local population changes as indicated by variations in electorates of British parliamentary constituencies, 1955—1970
Figure 4 Local population changes as indicated by variations in electorates of British parliamentary constituencies, 1955—1970
population from the metropolitan area, largely through provision of publicly rented housing. A further three of these thirteen constituencies lay at the peripheries of the Birmingham, Liverpool, and Manchester conurbations and included large-scale housing developments initiated by the respective city authorities. Such migrations of population from inner cities to areas of planned overspill of course also carried implications for the distribution of social and economic opportunity within regions, in so far as the migrant families became able to enjoy higher standards of housing and other physical amenities. On the other hand, these benefits were accompanied by widespread dislocations of established patterns of social relationships, the effects of which were much more difficult to evaluate.

Governmental influences on regional change

Looking into the future from the mid-seventies, there is a widespread expectation that the tendency towards dispersal from the conurbations is likely to continue, as also is the tendency for migration southwards in search of improved employment opportunities and living environments. However, some gradual yet significant changes have taken place since the fifties and sixties in the nature of the controls available to government to exert influence over these trends. On the one hand, there has been a gradual shift of emphasis from public towards private housing, as the immediate problems of post-war reconstruction have receded and the economics of the housing market have increasingly asserted themselves. These trends have left government with less direct power to channel the movement of population out of the more congested urban areas. On the other hand, the persistence of higher levels of unemployment in the North and West has forced governments in introduce a steadily increasing range of measures to influence the regional distribution of employment opportunity, a problem lately becoming subject to supranational policy influences through accession to the European Economic Community.
Meanwhile, the continuing spread of car ownership has increased the mobility of a large sector of the working population, making it a more difficult matter to integrate government controls over housing, employment, transportation, and other services. The result has been a search for increasingly sophisticated methods of local and regional planning, seeking to combine skills of physical, social, and economic analysis, while at the same time calling for an increased level of co-ordination between the relevant public authorities.
In Great Britain, most of the public controls over the processes of
Figure 5 History of changes in central government departments concerned with fields of policy relating to local and regional change within England*
Figure 5 History of changes in central government departments concerned with fields of policy relating to local and regional change within England*
local and regional change have evolved either within the structure of central departments controlled by the national parliament, or within that of local authorities controlled by independently elected councils. However, a growing awareness of the failures of these institutions to adapt to new and more complex processes has led, especially during the late sixties and early seventies, to a series of sweeping structural reforms. In introducing the various governmental and other institutions concerned with local and regional change in Britain, we shall therefore begin by outlining the more basic characteristics of the main central and local government agencies, mentioning briefly some of the ways in which these have been modified by recent reform proposals. A fuller analysis of some of the implications of these changes will follow in later chapters.

Departments of central government

The authority of central government in Great Britain derives from the parliamentary system, the conventions of which have evolved over several centuries without the support of a formal written constitution. The political party returned to power at each general election, for a maximum period of five years, expects to see its leader appointed as Prime Minister by the Sovereign, after which he in turn appoints a Cabinet including Ministers responsible for the main Departments of State. Continuity of administration is assured through a strictly non-party-political Civil Service, and the Permanent Secretaries and other senior officials of Departments can generally expect security of tenure in their appointments despite periodic changes of parliamentary control. Of the two dominant national parties, Labour held power from 1945 to 1951 and again from 1964 to 1970, with the Conservative party in control in the intervening years and also after the 1970 general election. These changes of control often led directly to certain changes in departmental organization, and an attempt is made in Figure 5 to set out graphically the main changes introduced in those departments concerned with the functions most directly related to the processes of local and regional change.
Within England, the war-time years saw a Ministry of Town and Country Planning established for the first time, taking its place alongside the three other Departments that were then responsible for fields of policy related to regional development: the Ministry of Health (then carrying responsibility for housing and local government); the Ministry of Transport; and the Board of Trade, which was responsible for controls over industrial location among other aspects of commercial affairs. In 1951, responsibility for land-use planning was re-integrated with that for housing and local government affairs in a new Ministry of Housing and Local Government; and the next significant change came in 1964 with the creation of a new (but in the event short-lived) Department of Economic Affairs. Set up as a counterweight to the influence of the Treasury in the field of economic management, this Department had among its tasks a co-ordinating responsibility in the field of regional economic planning, to be exercised through a system of Regional Boards of civil servants representing different functional departments. These Boards in turn were to be advised by Regional Economic Planning Councils whose members were to be appointed to reflect broad regional interests. Thus, for the first time within England, an embryonic form of regional government was introduced, albeit with purely advisory powers.
On the disbandment of the DEA in 1969, its regional responsibilities were transferred to the Ministry of Housing and Local Government, which was by this time loosely federated with the Ministry of Transport under a Secretary of State for Local Government and Regional Planning. The process of integration was taken a step further in 1970 with the creation of a large new Department of the Environment. In this department, under the overall control of a Secretary of State, the main responsibilities were divided among Ministers concerned respectively with housing and construction, with local government and...

Table of contents