A Resource Allocation Framework for Strategic Planning

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There are three pressures currently operating to focus local government attention on questions of resource allocation. First, despite periodic setbacks and reverses, there appears to be a long term trend towards more corporate decision-making in local government, with the allocation of resources between and within departments providing a unifying concern. Secondly, because of the current economic situation, central government is imposing tight financial constraints on the overall level of local government activity. Finally, further to its overall financial control, central government is extending its involvement in the formulation of specific local authority programmes via the new resource-based investment plans that service departments are required to produce Housing Investment Programmes (HIPs), Transport Policies and Programmes (TPPs), etc.1 This growing emphasis on resource allocation is forcing a re-examination of the traditional functions of planning within local government, and in particular posing problems as to the content and implementation of structure plans. The reason for this is the paradoxical manner in which local strategic planning has evolved in Britain. On the one hand, it is out of the land-use planning tradition that structure planning has arisen, which means that our most comprehensive attempt to plan the development of a local area has no resource base to support it. In contrast, the rapidly proliferating departmental investment programmes seem likely to draw much more for their formulation on the short term budgeting tradition in local government, with few effective links to structure planning so far evident. There is consequently a danger of the parallel, but separate, development of ineffectual structure plans without the resources or policy instruments to implement them, and fragmented departmental investment plans without the longer term perspective provided by an integrated, resource-based plan for the authority as a whole. This paper starts by summarising the shortcomings of the current treatment of both resources and departmental policies in structure planning. It then attempts to confront one aspect of the general problem by suggesting an analytical framework for strategic planning which can be used both to explore the underlying processes of economic, social and physical change in a local area, and to integrate the resource-based policies and programmes of different service departments. Following an outline of the general elements of the framework, its use is illustrated first as a descriptive model of the structure of a local economy, and then as a method for generating alternative housing programmes within the descriptive framework. The presentation of the approach is schematic, with appropriate reference made to other papers in which equation systems and further technical detail can be found.