Putting Localism in Place: Conservative Images of the Good Community and the Contradictions of Planning Reform in England

Abstract

Over the past 5 years, the UK Coalition and subsequent Conservative governments have sought to develop an agenda of localism. Recent research has evaluated how this has played out in practice. This article takes a different approach, interpreting how the language of community and place in English politics has been mobilized in reforms of the country’s planning system. We do this by tracing how conservative traditions of political thought and imagery of place were used to advance localism. This reveals a range of contradictions within the English localism agenda and highlights the wider political challenges raised by attempts to mobilize the affective and morally charged language of the local.

Keywords:

• Localism
• conservatism
• planning reform
• political ideology

Notes

1. Whilst the Coalition Government was elected across the whole of the UK, it is important to note that its localism agenda applied mainly to England since many aspects of local government are now devolved to Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland.

2. This was the first peace-time coalition in Westminster since the 1930s and therefore required a considerable shift in the prevailing political mindset of the country.

3. The article treats the Big Society and Localism agendas as closely related or near synonyms. This reflects the key emphasis the Coalition Government placed on decentralization of power as a means of building the Big Society, and the particularly close relationship between their articulation in the field of planning.

4. And recognizing, but choosing to bracket, the differences between the approaches of the various authors cited above.

5. As Eagleton (2009) notes, Burke’s argument is not solely about the ‘small place’ and does not preclude allegiance to the monarch or the nation, it is merely the ‘first principle’, the root of these higher order affections.

6. For example, Harold Macmillan, as Minister of Local Government and Planning introduced Regional Housing Boards in 1952. Similar boards were wound up by the Coalition Government in 2011.

7. Currently in England, only the applicant has the right to appeal against a decision they do not agree with.

8. Indeed, it is important to note that whilst the tension between growth and localism runs to the heart of Conservative politics in England, it proved equally problematic under New Labour who similarly identified planning as a problem for both businesses and communities and sought to implement wide-ranging reforms that they claimed would produce a system that could somehow work for all stakeholders. In this regard, further rounds of planning reform should be seen as part of a longer running failure to adequately address the contradictions that the planning system is being asked to reconcile.

9. Commitment to preservation of green belt designations remains a powerful symbol in the politics of English planning (see Elson, 1986).

10. Space precludes a fuller discussion of these measures here, this is not to imply that they are not significant for understanding the overall picture of the Coalition Government’s planning reforms, however, that is beyond the scope of this article.

11. Space precludes a full discussion of the political construction of the housing crisis, however, we view this as a problematic simplification of a complex issue that runs close to the core of the broader economic crisis.