Planning, housing, infrastructure, place governance and related issues seem to be higher on the political agenda this autumn than they have been for many years. The cancellation of Phase Two of HS2, controversies over 15-minute cities, major announcements from big hitters in the Labour party on overhauling planning to ‘get Britain building’, new towns, a massive expansion of affordable housing, and more devolution have all made headlines.
Local government’s ongoing financial troubles, including the soaring costs of housing those impacted and excluded by the seemingly intractable housing crisis, compound the sense that something needs to shift in the way places are planned and managed. At a wider scale, unease and anxieties about the future stem from the tense international geopolitical situation, ever-harder-to-ignore climate change events, and the Brexit-induced straitening of public finances and erosion of standards, trust and competence in public life.
Against this background, it seems that ambitious politicians are slowly rediscovering the idea that offering hope rather than adopting crude populism or stoking division might be one route to voter support. Paying attention to core issues of place quality and ‘hearth and home’ has emerged as one variant of this tendency, which has led politicians from different parties to talk about their ‘plans for planning’. All this places planning in an intriguing and in many ways ironic position, given that for much of the past 40 years it has been routinely maligned from across the political spectrum and by an endless stream of criticism – notably from opaquely funded liberal-libertarian think tanks. As Sir Peter Hall commented in one of his final reflections on the state of planning, ‘planning has become the villain, held responsible for an accelerating housing shortage, powerless to stop bad development’. Yet, today, after the construction and ad nauseam repetition of the narrative of planning failure, it seems that leading political figures and movements once again want planning ‘to be their friend’, both as a rhetorical device through which to promise ‘fixes’ to societal problems and – for those who have thought that far ahead – as an actual delivery mechanism. Have they come to accept the aphorism attributed (in varying formulations) to historical figures including Benjamin Franklin and Winston Churchill that ‘by failing to plan, you are planning to fail’?
Welcome as such an about-turn may appear to many in the business of planning, some caution is required. For one thing, despite the implicitly more central positioning of and attention to planning, the implication lingers that there has been something ‘wrong’ with planning and that if we only fixed it (and of course each party claims to be the one to do this), all would be well. But this proposition leaves unexamined the possibility that the unsatisfactory outcomes of much planning and development reflect the failures not so much of the planning system and planners, but of wider government decision making and policy on place making and spatial governance – for example, the stringent austerity imposed on local governments for over a decade, or the abolition of strategic planning at the sweep of a pen under the 2010–2015 Coalition government. Put in other terms, the questions are whether it is planning itself that is in a failing state, or rather if it is planning which is hamstrung by counterproductive central government actions or ‘state’ failure. Our new book Planning in a Failing State speaks to these agendas and contributes to debates on the state of the UK and the UK state in different fields including geography and political commentary. We identify four tendencies in the central state’s counterproductive impacts on planning outcomes under a rubric of ‘4 Rs’:
Rhetoric: the use by government ministers and others of powerful language, often critical of the planning system and/or the planners who work within it, to justify the changes they wish to make to how planning operates. This creates a sense of planners and planning being ‘under attack’ which contributes to poorer planning outcomes. It also contributes, among other pressures, to sapping the morale of those in the profession, and hampers recruitment and retention of planners particularly in the public sector where planners feel ‘overstretched, undervalued and under-resourced’. An objective observer listening to the ambitious rhetoric of government on how it will deliver ‘fundamental reform’ may also wonder how it is possible for planning to be simultaneously faster, more inclusive, less bureaucratic, more certain, greener while still delivering more housing. Despite their grand claims, ministers have yet to devise a planning system that does indeed deliver on all those fronts.
Rapidity: the speed with which changes to legislation and policy have been introduced since 2010 is often replicated by the speed of further changes to remedy ill-thought or executed reforms. This characteristic can be seen from the earliest days of the 2010–2015 Coalition government, when the wide-ranging Localism & Decentralisation Bill (later the Localism Act 2011) was introduced with no preceding White or Green Paper, something which was unusual at the time. A pattern of ‘stop-start reform over several years’ has contributed to policy uncertainty with real impacts on planning. Changes to planning which are then amended or withdrawn have significant implications for local authorities trying to implement national policy – for example, they may waste many months on drafting local plans only for these to be stalled, delayed or withdrawn as a result.
Resourcing: despite ambitious schemes from the UK government for planning in England – and as is the case for many other policy sectors over the past 13 years, from education to health – the parallel programme of ‘austerity’ has severely limited opportunities for delivery. Cuts to local government budgets have prevented the grand promises from yielding results on anywhere near the scale assured. Public expenditure on planning services in England, for example, contracted by 16 per cent between 2009–10 and 2022–23. Under-resourcing exacerbates issues of recruitment and retention, notably in local government. In a Royal Town Planning Institute survey conducted in Spring 2023, ‘82 per cent of respondents working for local authorities said their employer had had difficulties hiring planners in the previous 12 months’.
Regressive outcomes: from recent claims made around ‘levelling up’, back through the last decade’s talk of rebalancing the UK, ministers have claimed that the changes they are making will improve lives and outcomes for all, across diverse places. However, a consequence of the above three recurring factors, along with other drivers including ideology and electoral tactics, have, in fact, had the opposite result. Levelling up, if it is to mean anything at all and not remain a ‘ghost’, means marrying intelligent mechanisms for statutory planning with place-focused investment programmes. Yet choices such as Brexit have exacerbated the challenges, for example by impacting communities that were already ‘left behind’ with higher food price inflation and the loss of multiannual and innovation-targeted EU structural funds.
Planning connects to a range of issues high on the political agenda including housing, devolution and localism, the creation of ‘beautiful’ places, the consequences of Brexit for environmental protection and levelling up, adaptation to climate change, and the delivery of adequate infrastructure. It seems that this is now being recognised by current and aspiring political leaders. In many ways this is positive. However, experience over the past decade also tells us that counterproductive tinkering and constant cycles of reform must be avoided, and that planning must be properly resourced if it is to fulfil its potential to deliver better places that work for all and respect environmental limits.
Olivier Sykes is Senior Lecturer in European Spatial Planning at the University of Liverpool. His research and teaching interests include international planning studies, urban regeneration and planning for heritage conservation.
John Sturzaker is Ebenezer Howard Professor of Planning at the University of Hertfordshire. His research and teaching interests include community planning, rural planning and planning for housing.
Planning in a Failing State Edited by Olivier Sykes and John Sturzaker is available here for £85.99 on the Bristol University Press website.
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