Planning at the Crossroads Again: Re-evaluating Street-level Regulation of the Contradictions in New Labour’s Planning Reforms

Abstract

The paper offers an analysis of recent and ongoing reform to English local planning through consideration of the structural contradictions of planning. It goes on to relate these to an understanding of the contradictions within New Labour's ‘Third Way’ ideology. Finally, at greater length, it positions the attempts to ‘modernize planning’ since 1997 within this contradiction-laden political context. In so doing, the paper seeks to understand the ambiguous nature of the relationship between New Labour and planning, and how it has been interpreted within planning's policy and professional communities. The argument suggests that there is a need for re-evaluation of the often derided political value of planners' roles as street-level regulators within the complexities of the neoliberal state.

Notes

1. This article draws upon material from ongoing doctoral research that has included interviews with figures both inside and outside government involved in the modernization of the planning system in England since 2001. Extracts from these interviews are used in this paper, and interviewees are referred to as members of the planning policy community. Further interview material with rank and file practitioners is also drawn upon in the later part of the paper.

2. As such the paper is chiefly concerned with English local planning as a site of considerable, but not always clearly contested, change during the past 10 years. As a result it is far from a comprehensive account of the wider planning system's interaction with the New Labour government and makes no attempt to assess several other strands of influential change, including in environmental and urban policy and constitutional matters (i.e. devolution and regionalism), some of which are treated elsewhere in the present issue.

3. The focus of this critique has varied to some extent across time, and with events. Different lobbies have sought to articulate their concerns using a broadly similar language about planning as a slow and bureaucratic impediment to the ‘proper’ functioning of markets. Thus, despite apparently being repudiated by the Select Committee, such concerns have not gone away. More recently, this neoliberal critique has been a feature of renewed debate around housing shortages (see, for example, Evans & Hartwich, 2007). The neoliberal problematization of planning has therefore remained a constant feature of policy debate.