Planning System In England Research Articles

Localism and the will to housing: neighbourhood development plans and their role in local housing site delivery in England

ABSTRACT The planning system in England is regarded as a key mechanism for the delivery of housing but is also seen by some as a brake on its supply. In this context, the introduction of neighbourhood planning in 2011 has been promoted as a mechanism to reduce opposition to new housing and aid housing growth. This paper focuses on how this policy tool has been implemented with a view to mobilising communities to assist in the allocation of housing sites. The paper draws on empirical data to illustrate the role, motivations, and response to neighbourhood planning and its impact on the delivery of housing.

Ensuring Archaeology in the Planning System Delivers Public Benefit

Archaeologists in the UK work in a variety of structures, but all archaeology is for the benefit of the public. Since 1990 the majority of archaeological work has been undertaken as part of the planning process. A complex system has evolved which attempts to deliver wider public benefit. There are differences between England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, but the underlying principles are broadly the same across the UK. In 2020 radical changes were proposed to the planning system in England which could potentially impact on both the archaeological profession and the public benefits it generates. This paper outlines the evolution and operation of the current UK system with particular reference to England, and highlights some changes that the new proposals could make to the status quo. Some structural issues are highlighted which will need to be overcome for archaeologists to improve things for themselves and for the society they serve in the future.

Principles into Policy: Assessing the Impact of Conservation Principles in Local Planning Policy

ABSTRACTThe arc of policy change in heritage conservation in England – from the 1967 Civic Amenities Act to the National Planning Policy Framework 2018 – spans significant shifts in the underpinning principles supporting conservation policies. While national policies can be interpreted as inflections of changing policy frameworks enacted in international and European arenas, the interplay is complex and causal relationships may be impossible to demonstrate conclusively. This paper takes the instance of English Heritage (now Historic England)’s Conservation Principles, Policies and Guidance for the sustainable management of the historic environment (2008) and considers its international hinterland and legacy. While it has no formal status in the heritage protection or planning system in England, this research examines its sustained presence in local heritage planning policy. An examination of local heritage strategy documents shows that Conservation Principles, and the body of early 21st-century European and international thought that it reflects, are embedded in current practice in local authority policy-making. This impact is notable in the context of an English statutory planning and heritage protection system largely unchanged for 30 years, and attests to the agency of innovative international conservation principles despite the inertia of national heritage reform.

Climate change adaptation in the planning of England’s coastal urban areas: priorities, barriers and future prospects

Climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing society and the spatial planning system plays a crucial role in ensuring that important adaptations to the built environment are evaluated. Drawing upon a mixed-methods research approach, this paper explores the progress that has been made by the planning system in England in addressing the challenge of climate change adaptation in coastal urban areas. The results indicate that the adaptation produced through the planning system remains incremental rather than transformative. It is focused on experienced hazards, especially flooding, and there is a lack of attention being paid to wider impacts of climate change, such as rising average temperatures. Furthermore, it was found that the contemporary contribution of planning to climate change adaptation is seriously limited by the government’s emphasis on housing and economic growth and by the development industry’s emphasis on economic viability.

The London County Council's Approach to Town Planning: 1909–1945

The problems and issues which have arisen in respect of the present planning system in England have led to calls for a fundamental review of its scope, objectives and outcomes. In view of the growing importance of planning history this article reviews the LCC's approach to town planning between 1909 and 1945. Doubts were expressed about the relevance of town planning schemes bearing in mind that most of the land in the county lay outside the scope of the Housing, Town Planning, etc., Act, 1909. It was not until 1924 that the Council approved the preparation of town planning scheme (TPS) No. 1 (Streatham) and TPS No. 2 (South-East). By 1934 it had approved the preparation of a further sixteen planning schemes which covered some 24,000 acres of the 76,000 acres of the county. Following the election of the Labour Party the Council authorised the preparation of TPS No. 19 (County of London) which covered a further 51,507 acres and brought the whole of the county under interim planning control. It was approved by the Minister in 1935 following a three week public inquiry. These schemes ensured that new buildings observed reasonable standards of light, air and density which most landowners accepted. In 1941 Lord Reith, the Minister of Works and Buildings, encouraged the Council to prepare a plan for the future physical development of the county. The Council authorised the preparation of a plan by Professor Patrick Abercrombie and Mr John Henry Forshaw, the Council's architect. The County of London Plan 1943 was formally approved by the Council in 1945 and underpinned the 1951 Development Plan prepared by the Council in accordance with the provisions of the Town and Country Planning Act 1947.

Not out of the woods yet : Spatial planning (de)regulation under the Coalition Government

The Conservative-Liberal Democrat Coalition agreement presented in 2010 included the announcement of an intention to proceed with a radical reform of the spatial planning system in England, as part of a broad ambition to reduce what various government officials represented as a “burden of bureaucracy” undermining economic growth. Major reforms have indeed been undertaken over the last three years, with the introduction of the Localism Act 2011, a new National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) and the Growth and Infrastructure Act 2013. The Government has also put forward proposals for a ‘biodiversity offsetting’ scheme which it argues has the potential to simultaneously promote environmental conservation and boost the economy by speeding up decision-making in the planning system. This paper proposes to examine some of the debates generated by these recent developments in spatial planning policy in England, focusing on questions relating to environmental conservation issues.

A new vision for planning – There must be a better way?

The planning system in England is a mess! There are six pieces of primary legislation governing the planning process and a further nine pieces of directly related legislation. All but one of these ...

What Can Social Capital Tell Us About Planning Under Localism?

Local government and the planning system in England are set to be significantly overhauled with the passage of the Localism Act, which received Royal Assent on 15th November 2011. The localism agenda sees a new enhanced role for community participation but this raises a number of key questions: Who will get involved? Will the Act foster NIMBYism? How far can the localism agenda engender action toward implementation? Using the concept of social capital we examine these questions and outline what the key dilemmas may be for localist planning, in the process assessing the value of the social capital concept for such an analysis.

Localism, down-scaling and the strategic dilemmas confronting planning in England

The planning system in England has been subject to dramatic shifts since 2010. The previous government's preference for a strong regional focus in land-use strategy has been substituted with an emphasis on local control and responsibility. This has involved a ‘down-scaling’ of the system, with the revocation of ‘regional spatial strategies’ and a re-emphasis of the primacy of local government plans. It has also brought a ‘localisation’ of plan-making to a neighbourhood scale and a new role for community actors within local development planning. The shift in scale and focus has been accompanied by concerns over the system's ability to achieve broader and longer-term spatial objectives. Drawing on in-depth interviews with senior planning officers, this paper reflects on the risks that reform poses to the achievement of strategic planning objectives, looking in particular at housing delivery.

Limits to Growth: The Challenge of Housing Delivery in England's ‘Under-bounded’ Districts

In the UK, the outward growth of settlements beyond their existing territorial boundaries has until recently been managed primarily through local negotiation between neighbouring authorities or by the coordination and impetus provided by strategic planning. The current overhaul of the planning system in England, with the removal of regional planning, has unlocked a debate over how ‘larger than local’ planning is undertaken and how cross-boundary cooperation is promoted. This paper reports, firstly, on planning professionals' recent experience of cooperating on major housing developments in three under-bounded authorities. Secondly, it reflects on the loss of the regional tier, and thirdly, it examines expectations of a more locally oriented planning system and its likely capacity to deliver on major cross-boundary projects.

Making Plans: The Role of Evidence in England's Reformed Spatial Planning System

This paper explores the use of evidence in the making of local development frameworks in England, introduced as part of the 2004 Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act. The reforms dictate that for a plan to be considered ‘sound’, the policy choices it contains must be justified through the compilation and use of an appropriate evidence base. The paper draws on research undertaken as part of the UK government-sponsored Spatial Plans in Practice (SPiP) project looking into the operation of the reformed spatial planning system in England. It draws on the findings of a number of reports produced as part of this research on the use of evidence in the making of local development frameworks in England as well as wider components of the SPiP project including interviews with local authority planning officers, documentary review of adopted planning documents (core strategies and area action plans) and a longitudinal suite of case studies covering a number of local planning authorities using both qualitative semi-structured interviews and a strategic survey. The paper finds grounds to believe that, although local planning authorities are collecting more evidence than ever before, the culture of using evidence to inform policy-making is far from a well-established or uniform practice.

Introduction: Place shaping, spatial planning and liveability

The articles contained in this special issue are evolved versions of papers presented at a workshop held at University College London (UCL) in March 2008, and supported by the Regional Studies Association. The papers and discussions at UCL explored the potential of the new planning system in England to deliver a broader 'place-shaping' agenda with a view to achieving enhanced 'liveability' within more 'sustainable' communities, eco-towns, and regenerated neighbourhoods. It took as its main focus 'place and place shaping', the emergent processes of the spatial planning approach in England, and liveability as a central goal of the sustainable communities agenda. It mixed contributions from both researchers and planning and urban design practitioners. Of the 13 papers presented at UCL, eight are included in this special issue, covering the principal themes of the workshop. Although the term 'place shaping' has become strongly associated with recent planning and local government reforms in England - and with the desire to establish a mode of 'holistic local governance' able to deliver on several fronts and effect comprehensive and positive change in local communities - the term is not new. The idea that different processes come together to 'shape' environments is a central theme in human geography. However, coupled with a concern for urban governance in the 1990s, interest arose in how collectively urban actors organise the 'production flows', linked to the 'wider structuring dynamics of the economic and political relations in a society' (Hull, 1998, 327) that result in different spatial outcomes. From here, it was only a short leap to the idea that 'spatial planning' should play a more central role in influencing the actors and hence these flows: that whilst it should not abandon its traditional focus on land-use control (see below), it should look to new ways of 'shaping places'. In the last ten years, 'place shaping' has become the leitmotiv of planning in England, although many commentators contend that planning only shapes urban and rural places by virtue of its central position in the processes of holistic local governance (Owen et al., 2007). The term's use in policy circles has become common-place since the Lyons Inquiry's call to promote a 'wider strategic role for local government' (Lyons, 2007, Para. 14) that involves the 'creative use of powers and influence to promote the general well-being of a community and its citizens' (Lyons, 2007, Para. 2.43). In policy terms, 'spatial planning' is often understood as the fusing of powers to effect direct control over the physical environment (through its armoury of policy tools) with the broader power of local government to facilitate change by working closely with other actors: a return, essentially, to comprehensive planning. Place shaping, conflated with the idea of strategic spatial planning, is viewed as the antithesis of the un-ambitious, incremental planning of recent decades that had retrenched into regulation and lost sight of long-term goals (Cullingworth, 1996): place shaping might be considered a return to 'planning with vision'. Indeed, the key criticism of the planning process in recent years has been its claimed inability to 'shape' places, mainly because the forces and processes of change are frequently beyond the control of conventional planning intervention. What does this mean in practice? The UK planning system, as instituted in 1947, was concerned with 'plan-making' and 'development control': the business of drawing up land-use plans and policing development (i.e. material changes in land use) in accordance with these plans. But some things - the structuring dynamics combined with production flows (organised by other actors), that 'shape a place' and influence the vibrancy of its economy; generate social mix; or sustain environmental quality - cannot be steered directly by this form of planning (Wong et al., 2006). Land-use planning can create or deny opportunities (in some circumstances), but in order to directly or indirectly shape outcomes, other individuals and groups have to be engaged - often on a voluntary basis - and their programmes and investments brought in line with a vision shared by a range of partners. …

Conceptualising spatial planning outcomes: Towards an integrative measurement framework

The breadth of the desired planning objectives, the lack of precision surrounding their definition and the complex institutional environment make it a rather difficult task to ascertain the outcomes of spatial planning. This article aims to deal with some of the long-standing challenges of disentangling the conceptual and methodological issues associated with the measurement of spatial planning outcomes and performance in the context of the new spatial planning system in England. It will then put forward a strategic integrative framework for assessing spatial planning outcomes that emphasises the importance of vertical and horizontal integration of policy monitoring within a spatial analytical framework; the flexibility of combining different types of indicators across different themes to develop policy intelligence; and the need for a collaborative approach among key stakeholders in the use of indicators to provide feedback and to reframe their policy vision, objectives and strategies.

Strategic-Local Tensions and the Spatial Planning Approach in England

This paper explores the strategic-local tensions, sometimes manifest as development conflicts, which remain a feature of the planning system in England. More particularly, it is concerned with the way local government and planning reforms brought forward over the last decade have affected these tensions and conflicts. It looks at three issues: why conflicts arise, focusing on the example of housing development, and how the reformed processes of local governance and planning respond to them; how a divergence in local government and planning reform may accentuate conflicts by creating two distinct, and sometimes contradictory, planning systems; and what actions might be taken to bridge these systems and ease local-strategic tensions, returning to the example of housing.

Integrated water resource management and institutional integration: realising the potential of spatial planning in England

This paper explores the various dimensions of integration that need consideration in developing appropriate institutional arrangements for integrated water resource management (IWRM), drawing upon both IWRM and spatial planning sources. As a result, a framework of integration in IWRM is set out. This is then used to consider the strengths and weaknesses of the new spatial planning system in England, and its potential to contribute to IWRM activities that are being developed, partly in response to the European Union Water Framework Directive. From this analysis it is argued that, taken overall, spatial planning is well placed to meet these challenges and it could in fact play a much more central role than is currently envisaged. An alternative model for IWRM in England is set out which sees the new river basin management plans as integral, rather than parallel, to the spatial planning system.

Increasing participation in planning: Emergent experiences of the reformed planning system in England

This article seeks to explore the emerging picture of participation under the New Labour planning reforms. In many senses this may appear as a familiar story of the gap between rhetoric and reality...

Delivering the planning system in England: Skills' capacity constraints

The planning system in England has recently undergone revision. At the same time local planning authorities are being required to implement new government initiatives, reviews and recently enacted EU legislation. All these changes are bringing in new ways of working for local authorities and sending the English planning system into a period of flux. Drawing on recent research the authors consider whether there is the capacity in terms of skills within local planning authorities in England for them to deliver the outcomes required by these changes.

Planning gain and the supply of new affordable housing in England: Understanding the numbers

The policy to generate land and finance for affordable housing through the land use planning system in England has now been in place for fifteen years – and is fast becoming the most important mechanism for adding to the stock of affordable housing. It is therefore an appropriate time to assess the extent to which the policy is achieving its objectives. To address this issue the paper draws on a number of complementary research projects to look at how the policy has developed and then at the evidence of outputs and outcomes. It first examines the numbers being achieved and the proportion of total output that this represents; it then looks at the regional and the tenure distribution of this output and lastly at the nature of other contributions made by developers. Finally the implications of the findings are discussed in the context of proposed policy changes

Community strategies and spatial planning in England: The challenges of integration

The reforms to the planning system in England and Wales introduced in the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 have understandably been the key preoccupation of the planning profession over th...

POLICY AND PRACTICE: Planning and the European union water framework directive

This paper is concerned with stimulating debate amongst land-use planning practitioners and researchers in relation to the possible consequences of the European Union Water Framework Directive. The potentially far-reaching ramifications for the Town and Country Planning system in England and Wales are examined in detail, presenting the case that planning, at all spatial scales, may have to give both water and environmental concerns greater consideration than has hitherto been the case. Furthermore, in the imminent future the planning system will need to begin the process of formulating policies in line with the aspirations of the Directive.