The Planning Polity

Planning, Government and the Policy Process

Mark Tewdwr-Jones

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• Print ISBN:
  9780415286558
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134447893
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Planning is not a technical and value free activity. Planning is an overt political system that creates both winners and losers. The Planning Polity is a book that considers the politics of development and decision-making, and political conflicts between agencies and institutions within British town and country planning. The focus of assessment is how British planning has been formulated since the early 1990s, and provides an in-depth and revealing assessment of both the Major and Blair governments' terms of office. The book will prove to be an invaluable guide to the British planning system today and the political demands on it. Students and activists within urban and regional studies, planning, political science and government, environmental studies, urban and rural geography, development, surveying and planning, will all find the book to be an essential companion to their work.

CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION

The British planning system is unique in Europe. As Newman and Thornley (1996) highlight in their overview of planning systems and policy across the European territory, the British planning process stands in isolation from other European countries. This is a consequence of its development within the legal process that has derived from Common Law, a system that has relied on pragmatism rather than a defined written constitution and bill of civil rights. An unwritten constitution proves flexibility, of course, but it also guarantees no formal rights whatsoever. The relationship between central government and local government, for example, is problematic in this regard since there is no protection if one tier decides to withdraw duties necessary for the other tier to function. Local government authorities in Britain traditionally undertake functions on behalf of central government; they do not possess power over their own affairs as of right, a situation in marked contrast to other European countries where local authorities possess power under the doctrine of general competence. Within these countries, central government will only interfere in the activities of local government if local levels are unable to undertake their functions.

In Britain, local authorities – although separately elected to central government – are agents of the government. Central government sets the financial and legal parameters and monitors the activities of local authorities. Local government is able to raise its own tax to fund local services, but most funding is derived from block grants received from central government. Equally, central government is able to remove powers from local government, or to define tight parameters for the delivery of local services. Bulpitt (1983) has described the relationship between the two levels of government as a ‘dual polity’, where officials tend to be employed distinctly in one level or the other. This also assists in explanations for conflicts and divergence between the functions and expectations of each tier over particular services, such as planning.

Planning is a government functional that sits across the dual polity. In recent years the issue of policy development and governmental relationships within the town and country planning process has been one of the dominant issues concerning professional planners, researchers and political scientists. A plethora of planning research textbooks have been published devoted to assessing the transitory nature of the British land use planning system and its place in contemporary socio-economic and environmental change in the new millennium (see, for example, Allmendinger, 2001a; Allmendinger and Thomas, 1998; Blowers and Evans, 1997; Booth, 1996; Chambers and Taylor, 1999; Cullingworth, 1999; Greed, 1996a, 1996b; Healey, 1997; Kitchen, 1997; Pennington, 2000; Tewdwr-Jones and Williams, 2001; Thomas, 1997; Thornley, 1993; Vigar et al., 2000). For a system that was under a perceived threat of virtual abolition by the Thatcher governments in the 1980s, planning as a governmental activity has received a renaissance in the 1990s under the Major government and more so since the election of a New Labour government, thanks to the emergence of the environmental agenda, a change in attitude on the part of the British government towards both planning and local government, and a recognition of the system’s ability to both facilitate and promote economic development and environmental protection and encompass a range of political aims and objectives as a form of state co-ordination. This planning renaissance has received widespread attention by academics and policy analysts over the last ten years, although very few of these critiques have provided a detailed assessment of the nature of the renaissance from a governmental, political and institutional perspective that focuses on policy format, scope and relationships between the separate but interrelated spheres inhabited by the agencies of planning (see Table 1.1).

The critiques can be categorised as falling within three broad camps:

1. The conceptual and theoretical basis of, and for planning and its manifestation into practical policy possibilities (Allmendinger, 2001a; Allmendinger and Chapman, 1999; Healey 1997; Vigar et al., 2000).
2. The ideological framework of planning and its manifestation as a political process (Allmendinger, 1997; Allmendinger and Thomas, 1998; Pennington, 2000; Thornley, 1991, 1993).
3. The practical and policy nature of planning and its manifestation as a governmental process and profession (Greed 1996a, 1996b; Kitchen, 1997; Tewdwr-Jones, 1996a; Tewdwr-Jones and Williams, 2001; Thomas, 1997).

Table 1.1 Academic critiques of planning in Britain

These three broad camps of critiques have provided students and researchers of planning with an array of material, evidence and assessments of the trajectory of the planning system in England, Scotland and Wales in the 1990s and the new millennium. And while they have proved valuable as explanations for and of planning change, there has simultaneously been a dearth of research evidence that has empirically explored how these changes are manifesting themselves into both the governmental and political processes of the state and the policy-making contexts of planning practice. In other words, an assessment is required of the planning system in England, Scotland and Wales that attempts to bridge the second and third analytical camps and present conceptual findings that will assist the first analytical camp; to combine a review of and understanding for the ideological framework of planning and its manifestation as a political process since the early 1990s with an empirical focus on how this ideological underpinning has caused the development of structures and policies within the practical and policy world of planning and government. It is this desire to combine political ideology, multi-level government activity and planning policy analytically that forms the distinctive contribution of this book and its overall aim. The time is certainly opportune for such an analytical assessment.

The principal state agencies of planning currently comprise the national UK government; the devolved governments in Scotland and Wales; the government’s regional offices in England, that are responsible for both delivering the government’s planning objectives through national policy guidance and ensuring consistency across local authorities on an intra-regional basis; regional assemblies, that are taking responsibility increasingly for forming regional policy; and local government, comprising county councils, district councils, and unitary authorities in certain areas (that combine the functions of counties and districts) and are charged with preparing local planning policies (see Table 1.2).

This planning polity is relatively recent. Prior to the establishment of these administrative and political tiers, planning policy was formulated before 1997 by a relatively small number of agencies. These comprised the national UK government; central government offices in the English regions and in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland; and local government. Devolution to the Celtic countries and decentralisation to the English regions since 1997 has complicated the planning polity landscape.

The town and country planning system is formulated and implemented at all these levels of the planning polity. Central government, the county councils and the district councils, and the unitary councils are all elected independent of each other but largely implement a planning policy process that is interdependent. Regional government is an emerging process in England at the present time, but a regional planning policy nevertheless exists and is formulated by strategic local authorities within each region or regional assemblies. The government established a revised framework for planning policy at the national, regional, county and local levels in Britain under the provisions of a so-called ‘plan-led’ planning system within the Planning and Compensation Act 1991. This revised framework, by giving enhanced weight to locally formulated planning policies, appeared to provide the local levels of the planning polity with greater authority, to a degree, in planning policy formulation (MacGregor and Ross, 1995; Tewdwr-Jones, 1994a, 1994b). This followed the centralising tendencies of the Thatcher governments in the 1980s (Thornley, 1993, 1996), but was nevertheless implemented by a New Right government that believed in continuing with a centralising theme that directly impacted upon the nature of the relationships between policy at different levels of government (Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones, 1997b; Allmendinger and Thomas, 1998).

Table 1.2 Principal state agencies of British planning: the planning polity

Central government-formulated planning policy in the latter 1980s and early to mid-1990s appeared to be having a considerable effect on planning policy formulation at the lower levels of the planning framework, despite the rhetoric provided by ministers implementing a local plan-led process (Tewdwr-Jones, 1997c; Ying Ho, 1997; Baker, 1999). Associated with the provisions of this plan-led system that was introduced to achieve more national consistency and certainty in planning policy across England, Scotland and Wales, the amended planning polity framework seemed to result in new forms of central rule of law occurring to limit local authorities’ discretion.

The key issues that formed the basis of the research within this book were that:

• The planning policy formulation process operated in England, Scotland and Wales since the early to mid-1990s has been determined to a significant extent by central government’s national planning policies in its quest for national consistency and certainty across Britain.
• The national consistency remit enjoyed by central government militated against any sub-national alternative planning policy agenda promoted by local authorities and has been at variance with the locally formulated plan-led spirit of the Planning and Compensation Act 1991.

The key questions that arise in order to test these themes are:

1. How has central government used its legal planning remit to provide national consistency and certainty while promoting locally led planning agendas within local government?
2. To what extent do the changes to the British planning process of the late 1980s/early 1990s actually provide for sub-national and local authority policy alternatives and differentiation in formulating planning policies in the spirit of the plan-led legislation?
3. What were the political ways in which, first, the Conservative government and, lately, the Labour government, created new forms of national control over the formulation of local policy agendas; how have these been in the spirit of New Right and New Labour ideology, and how might answers to these questions assist us in conceptualising the planning relationship between central government and local government at this time?

This book takes as its starting point the existing literature and policy framework, and from this position pursues four objectives:

1. The development of the incidence and characteristics of planning policy formulation at different levels of government (that I refer to as the planning polity).
2. The assessment of the different dimensions or scale of planning policy relationships that exist between national agendas, regional concerns and local policies.
3. A detailed examination of planning policy tensions and conflicts between these governmental levels since the implementation of the Planning and Compensation Act 1991, in the pursuit of national consistency and certainty, regional compatibility and local discretion.
4. An assessment of the impact of these planning relations and tensions on the nature and operation of the planning policy process, based on the findings in objective 3.

The substantive focus of these objectives rests on each of the levels of planning administration within the planning polity. The emphasis of the literature review is on the planning policy dimensions of both central and local government in the latter 1980s, but more especially the 1990s. This is a necessary preliminary task in order to establish the interconnected nature of planning policy relationships occurring at multi-levels of government in England, Scotland and Wales and sets a context for the assessment of the tensions between national consistency, regional certainty and local discretion in planning policy formulation. In pursuing this assessment, extended discussions are devoted to considering the operation of the town and country planning system in Britain, and the alterations to planning caused as a consequence of changing governmental relations, changes to planning legislation and policy, changes to the political and administrative map of Britain as a consequence of devolution, and changes to the discretion available to local planning authorities.

From a theoretical perspective, the research attempts to place the ‘post-Thatcherite’ (Allmendinger and Tewdwr-Jones, 1997b) changes to the planning policy process in Britain in the context of New Right and New Labour ideologies. The Thatcher governments of the 1980s had implemented a New Right or neo-market policy towards urban development with the consequence that local authority public sector planning had been gradually watered down in favour of greater market determination, less local state intervention and discretion, and the centralisation of policy-making at a national level. The Major governments of 1990–7 followed with many of the Thatcherite policies, but implemented many new measures in the planning policy area. The New Labour government since 1997 has adopted many of the policies of the New Right in addressing planning policy matters, but with a greater emphasis towards a regional renaissance. The key question to consider is: to what extent did New Right ideology continue to form an underlying rationale for policy changes affecting planning in the late 1990s and beyond? Were the changes made by central government between 1990 and 1997, and 1997 and 2001, within the ideological parameters set by New Right thinkers?

During the period of Margaret Thatcher’s premiership of 1979–90, it is possible to identify and examine the legal and policy amendments undertaken by central government that reflected New Right thinking, including the centralisation of policies, the reorientation towards the market, and the requirement for speedy, efficient processes to assist the private sector. These changes are most evident in the plethora of national policies released, changes to development control, the fostering of an ‘appeal-led’ planning process by reducing local authorities’ discretionary powers, and in the deregulation of planning. The period after John Major acceded to the premiership coincides with a changed climate for the planning process. The introduction of a plan-led planning process, the incorporation of the environmental agenda, the striking of a policy balance between environmental and market concerns, the fostering of competitiveness as a component of government policy, and a reorientation towards public sector quality and standards, is in marked contrast with the market-orientated approach of Major’s predecessor. The election of the Blair government in 1997 promised a commitment to town and country planning (DETR, 1998c), with an enhancement of both the European and regional levels of planning policy, support for the plan-led system and planning control, and interest in utilising financial instruments within planning. But to what extent do these changes from both 1990–97 and 1997–2001 reflect New Right ideology, and do they represent a similar ideological vein to the New Right changes in the 1980s, or do they amount to an ideological difference away from New Right thinking? Although the research discussed within this book is restricted to analysis of the planning policy dimension, there are significant conceptual and theoretical issues that arise from the study, and these will be addressed later in the work.

Before proceeding with this programme, some important groundwork must be covered. It is necessary, first, to establish the institutional framework of the town and country planning system with particular reference to the 1980s and 1990s. This will provide an introduction to the administration of the planning polity in Britain and indicate the relationships between planning and government, and planning policy and legislation, as a function of central and local government. This section will also highlight the potential significance of formulating national, regional and local planning policies as an area of concern. The chapter then outlines the changes to the planning polity that have been implemented since the late 1960s to contextualise the focus of the research.

THE INSTITUTIONAL FRAMEWORK OF PLANNING POLICY

INTRODUCTION TO THE ADMINISTRATION OF PLANNING POLICY

The planning process operates in England, Scotland and Wales as a predominantly administrative system. Planning agencies and organisations responsible for the management of the built and natural environment agree on policies and programmes to instigate change, promote sites and prepare for development. Fundamental to this administrative role of planning agencies in facilitating or enabling is the preparation and implementation of policies, the allocation and organisation of goals, and the mediation of conflicting interests by those organisations competing for the allocation of scarce resources (e.g. land).

The planning policy process is therefore concerned with the preparation of land use plans and the control of development. Although planning, broadly defined, is something much more than plan-making and policy control, Britain has experienced a planning framework devoted almost entirely to a quasi-legal administrative system concerned with policy and control. Since the implementation of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, when development plans and development control were formally introduced, successive governments have laid particular emphasis on the need to prepare land use plans and ensure state control of the physical environment. These roles have been delegated to local government, with advice from central government and legal parameters established by courts of law. Even today, the main substance of the planning system is administered by governmental professional planning officers, either within forward planning teams (responsible for preparing planning policies) or development control teams (responsible for determining applications for planning permission by individuals and organisations).

Development plan preparation allows the community and those interested in physical change to participate in drafting policies of promotion or conservation. The resultant policies within development plans must be viewed therefore as an agreed set of principles to guide decision-makers on the future of the built and natural environment and as a means through which development opportunities are advertised to the private sector. Planning in Britain equates to physical land use development, and the promotion and control of that development rests with government. Planning policy, consequently, is fundamental to the future social and economic well-being of any spatial area since it is the essential ne...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• TABLES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• ABBREVIATIONS
• ‘POWER TO THE PEOPLE’
• CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION
• PART 1: POLITICAL IDEOLOGY, POLICY RELATIONS AND THE PLANNING PROCESS
• PART 2: PLANNING POLICY CONFLICTS IN GOVERNMENT RELATIONS
• PART 3: DEVOLUTION, DISTINCTIVENESS AND PLANNING POLICY DEVELOPMENT
• REFERENCES