Neoliberal Spatial Governance

Phil Allmendinger

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317385783
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Neoliberal Spatial Governance explores the changing nature of English town and city planning as it has slowly but clearly transformed. Once a system for regulating and balancing change in the built and natural environments in the public interest, planning now finds itself facilitating development and economic growth for narrow, sectional interests.

Whilst there is a lip service towards traditional values, the progressive aims and inclusivity that provided planning's legitimacy and broad support have now largely disappeared. The result is a growing backlash of distrust and discontent as planning has evolved into neoliberal spatial governance. The tragedy of this change is that at a time when planning has a critical role in tackling major issues such as housing affordability and climate change, it finds itself poorly resourced with low professional morale, lacking legitimacy and support from local communities, accused of bureaucracy and 'red tape' from businesses and ministers and subject to regular, disruptive reforms. Yet all is not lost. There is still demand and support for more comprehensive and progressive planning, one that is not purely driven by the needs of developers and investors. Resistance against the idea that planning exists to help roll out development, is growing.

Neoliberal Spatial Governance explores the background and implications of the changes in planning under the governments of the past four decades and the ways we might think about halting and reversing this shift.

1 Change and planning

DOI: 10.4324/9781315676647-1

The beginning of wisdom is in the discovery that there exist contradictions of permanent tension with which it is necessary to live and that it is above all not necessary to seek to resolve.

André Gorz, Farewell to the Working Class: An Essay on Post-industrial Socialism. Pluto Press, 1994: 19 (original, Editions Galilee, Paris, 1980)

Introduction

The contemporary history of English planning is characterized by instability and change. Reform has been driven by a ceaseless search for an ideal system, one that reconciles apparently irreconcilable tensions, seeking to provide certainty as well as flexibility and speed as well as coordination and comprehensiveness. That such tensions are played out against a backdrop of short-termism in political timescales and a lack of collective memory about previous rounds of reform at the national level and a growing demand for involvement if not autonomy at the local level produces a consistent and constant pressure for change. Underpinning the restlessness is a desire to reconcile another set of tensions which are more familiar to planning and planners. The desire for economic and physical growth, particularly since the late 2000s, has sat alongside the aspiration to protect the environment and tackle the drivers and effects of climate change, factors that question the simple ‘growth model’ of planning.

While change is a relatively new phenomenon for planning it is not just change and the resolution of tensions that is the issue. A certain bias, or movement, has influenced reforms. In short, planning has shifted incrementally but perceptibly away from an area of public policy that was an arena where such issues could be determined in the public interest to one that legitimizes state-led facilitation of growth and development by superficially involving a wide range of interests and issues. This book is about how and why planning has changed, the implications of this and what the future might hold. Underpinning the book is the understanding that land use planning is inherently contentious. Its disputatious nature derives from a range of characteristics and factors though the main reason is that those involved in the planning process largely seek different and irreconcilable objectives. For the environmentalist, planning exists to promote a particular form of sustainability related to protecting environmental assets and mitigating the impacts of climate change. For the developer or landowner, planning exists to manage change and provide information to help markets and reduce uncertainty. For the financier, planning helps to reduce risk by limiting and managing changes in the supply of land for development. For the local community, planning provides a way of ensuring that valued places are protected and that development proceeds in a sustained and coordinated way alongside infrastructure. Neighbours tend to see planning as a way of ensuring that their investment in a property is not reduced by inappropriate development and that their enjoyment of their home is not affected.

Land use planning is the arena in which these sometimes competing and sometimes overlapping interests come to be played out and ideally resolved in a transparent, democratic and rational way. Of course, these different views on the purpose of planning are not mutually exclusive or fixed – an environmentalist needs to live somewhere and a developer may value open countryside, for example. Nor do different interests and actors necessarily or even ordinarily ‘play fair’ when it comes to determining outcomes. Like other areas of public policy, planning is subject to ideological scuffles and the system is regularly reorientated and reformed to meet the expectations and agendas of different interests. In the 1980s business interests held sway while the 1990s were characterized more by what planning could do to help to protect the environment as well as to mitigate and adapt to growing concerns over climate change. In other words there is a struggle over the objectives of planning as well as the outcomes. The restless and regular reform of planning as it is pulled in different directions is partly a function of such tensions around the system’s purpose and priorities: developers claiming that the system is inhibiting development and environmentalists claiming that it is creating unsustainable development. Yet experience shows that simply reorienting planning to new national objectives and regulatory forms is not so simple – ‘fixing’ planning is never as easy as the advocates for reform assume. On the one hand there is a cognitive dissonance over interests: an ideologically libertarian landowner might agree that planning is necessary to protect the countryside, as long as it is not the area of countryside that he or she wishes to develop. Similarly, there is near universal agreement that the UK needs to build more housing; the questions arising are where, what kind of housing, and who will pay for the infrastructure? Answers to these questions impinge upon sectoral, personal as well as spatial interests. Sectorally, for example, landowners and developers have successfully resisted repeated forms of land taxation necessary for the provision of infrastructure (see Allmendinger, 2011, ch. 7). Spatially and personally there is a growing resistance to certain types of new development: private (rather than social) residential is the most desired form of development by housebuilders though it is also the most actively opposed at the local level (Saint UK Index, 2012). This contradiction – recognizing the need for more housing ‘but not in my backyard’ (NIMBY) – can be partly understood by the difference between homeowners and non-homeowners: the former are nearly twice as likely as the latter to oppose new residential development (NHPAU, 2009: 8).

On the other hand if planning is national in its orientation then it is largely local in its implementation. As protests against wind farms and high-speed rail routes reveal, consensus over nationally determined objectives can fall apart once the local consequences become clear. Discretion within the political space of local planning can mean that national policy objectives may be derailed and even subverted when local material considerations are factored in: what makes sense in Whitehall may not appear quite so clear in Whitehaven.

So not only is planning contentious but it is necessarily and rightly so. National planning objectives need to be both general and aspirational in order to cover the wide variety of local circumstances in which issues such as ‘sustainable development’ are made sense of. There are fundamental issues tied up in the different positions and attitudes towards planning around the nature of the state and the role of the market. There are also significant questions that are difficult if not impossible to address objectively, e.g. does planning inhibit economic growth; should we trade environmental for economic objectives in times of recession; should the national interest prevail over local considerations? A narrow view, such as that taken by the McKinsey Global Institute in its study of UK competitiveness, would argue ‘yes’ to the first question. This now infamous analysis, commissioned by the Treasury following the 1997 general election, argued that planning and other regulations were the root of the UK’s competiveness problem. Downplaying, if not ignoring, the beneficial role of planning when addressing market failure, facilitating social inclusion and wider, not easily quantifiable, dimensions of welfare and environmental protection, McKinsey recommended a comprehensive reform (deregulation) of land use regulations (McKinsey Global Institute, 1998).

The problem is not that the narrow, cost-based McKinsey view is clearly refutable (see ODPM, 2003) but that it echoes and reinforces the normative position of influential interests within the government and provides a simplistic narrative of an overbearing state smothering entrepreneurialism and ‘locking jobs in filing cabinets’. The McKinsey study was not a ‘one-off’ view: the history of UK planning over the past three decades or so is littered with similarly simplistic analyses that provide succour to those who see the world in terms of supply, demand and price signals. Neither is such a view exclusively held by those on the right of the political spectrum (Allmendinger, 2011). This ‘Treasury view’ of the role of UK planning continues to underpin and justify arguments to dismantle planning controls and has been in the ascendency since 2008 driven by the ‘credit crunch’ and recession, initially under the tail end of the Labour government but then gaining greater sway under the coalition between 2010 and 2015. Encouraged by think tanks such as the Policy Exchange (2007, 2012) and the Adam Smith Institute (2012) as well as industry groups such as the British Property Federation (BPF, 2008) and the Confederation of British Industry (CBI, 2011) the argument can be summed up as that planning controls thwart competitiveness and growth. For the most part this is not an argument for not having any kind of regulation but a specific, industry-supportive form of planning that can include direct intervention and public subsidy where appropriate. The more shrill, libertarian and minimalist perspectives on the need to abolish planning largely from the 1970s and 1980s have given way to arguments for a market-supportive planning based on minimal discretion and greater certainty even if such agendas were often couched in terms of ‘cutting red tape’.

However, if the Treasury’s simplistic and narrow perspective of planning provides us with too stark a picture then at the other end of the spectrum the more holistic perspectives are too comprehensive and intangible in their evaluations to be meaningful at anything but an abstract level. A focus on planning outcomes such as ‘well-being’ or sustainable development fits in with a generally supportive view of the role of planning and highlights a range of vague and difficult to measure though positive-sounding impacts of planning (see, for example, Vivid Economics, 2012). That we continue to be faced with such binary analyses of the purpose and impact of planning that pander to normative interests and positions is partly because that which we might term ‘modern planning’ in the UK was never given an explicit purpose and promised to achieve the resolution of competing issues around land and property in a rational and progressive way.

The state we're in

One outcome of this constant turf war over the objectives and nature of planning is that it constantly finds itself in a transient space at the point of reform, being reformed or implementing reform. In recent years it has become, in Haughton’s view, a ‘political football’:

In Britain planning is almost a paradigmatic example of a sector used as a ‘political football’, one that every incoming administration likes to use to explain the failings of the previous administration and demonstrate its own radical credentials. This makes for a bruised sector, used to multiple reforms intended to ‘cure’ a problem that has been ill-diagnosed.

(2012: 122)

Two broad views currently dominate the debate on the future of planning. The first school of thought privileges the local and argues for much greater weight to be placed upon local considerations in plan making and decision taking. The argument goes that planning is a local issue within a loosely defined and permissive national regime. The second view is that ‘less is more’ and that planning needs to be greatly reduced and more focused. What planning there is should be nationally consistent and seek to regulate and facilitate development and growth.

More (local) is more

There is a broad current argument that we need more planning that accords with the recent general desire for greater decentralization of policy and decision making. These arguments arise, respectively, from a growing environmental awareness and activism around a more socially just and inclusive planning system on the one hand and a distrust of national politics and policies on the other. Given the focus upon the local it is significant and ironic that the champions of a decentralized planning as a means of resisting new development are national bodies and interest groups such as Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth, the National Trust and the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds. These national bodies have combined with local activism to advance an environmental and social agenda through high-profile protests and challenges to national policies and projects including proposals for a third runway at Heathrow airport, the expansion of nuclear energy and wind power as well as the development of ‘fracking’, and transport projects such as the proposed High Speed Rail link to Birmingham.

Part of the move by these institutions towards a more localist agenda has been driven by a lack of effective mechanisms to influence and oppose development nationally. The broad thinking is that a more locally led planning will be able to challenge homogenous, national discourses about growth, and instead provide socially inclusive and sustainable futures (e.g. TCPA, 2015). The lack of opportunities for input into planning objectives and outcomes has led to a search for alternatives. Judicial review has provided the main route to challenging planning orthodoxy, although it is limited to contesting the process rather than the substance of planning-related decisions. As a result there have been repeated and increasing calls for the introduction of a third party right of appeal (TRPA) as a method of directly challenging the substance of a decision. At present an applicant can appeal against the decision of the local planning authority (or in the cases of non-determination, against a local planning authority not making a decision). However, this right of appeal does not extend to third parties such as residents and other interest groups. Both the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats included a commitment to introduce a TPRA in their 2010 election manifestos but decided against introducing it when in power from 2010 to 2015. Developers and landowners have been consistently against such a move (e.g. BPF, 2011) while environmental groups have been equally insistent that a TPRA is necessary (e.g. CPRE et al., 2002, 2013). Part of the justification for the introduction of a TPRA was the growth in and expense of judicial and statutory reviews of planning decisions, an avenue that, on the surface at least, is about process rather than the actual decisions. The motivation of the campaigners for the introduction of a TPRA and being able expressly to challenge the substance rather than the process of local decisions was based upon a growing feeling of impotence and the feeling that participation was being used to legitimize rather than inform, or even transform, decisions. Two environmental lawyers were prompted to call for a Tea Party movement for planning with the slogan ‘no taxation without representation’ (Le-Las and Shirley, 2012).

The coalition government of 2010–15 argued that its new approach of ‘planning localism’ addressed the concerns that had led to demands for a TPRA, i.e. a locally led, ‘bottom-up’ system that would give local residents and communities a much greater say in planning decisions. The chief executive of the BPF commented at the time of the general election in 2010 that ‘third party right of appeals would be a recipe for chaos. It would clog up the system and undermine everything the Tories have said about being pro-development’ (Pearce, 2010: 1).

Naturally, the decision to drop the TPRA and instead adopt localism had nothing to do with the opposition from the development industry and housebuilders, particularly during a recession when the government was keen to promote more not less development. Yet despite genuine concerns about local participation and involvement in planning it is difficult to tease out demands for involvement from local resistance to development.

There is a loose alliance of interests that subscribe to this form of localism, including environmentalists who consider local decision making more likely to be able to stand up to developers, liberals committed to greater decentralization, and idealistic professional bodies and groups that pursue the idea that, if approached in the right way, local planning can transcend conflict. The most vocal advocates, however, are national politicians who regard localism as a popular and low-risk and low-cost strategy countered, if not neutered, by a parallel strategy of pro-growth and development, in other words less is more. Since the general election in 2015 localism has been given a further boost through the commitment to roll out more neighbourhood planning, the commitment to a greater number of elected mayors and City Deals, all of which have been accompanied, confusingly, with proposals that run counter to such devolution and advance a market-supportive and deregulatory agenda.

Less is more

The other current dominant view on planning can be summed up as less is more. This is a common and consistent narrative throughout the recent history of planning that plays to business and development audiences. At various times deregulation has been emphasized by the national government as a strategy for growth and economic success though at certain points there is a heightened focus on shrinking planning control and speeding up the planning process. The last major anti-planning campaign emerged as part of the ideological struggle concerning the allocation of blame for the post-2008 credit crunch and recession. Planning, both generally and in the more specific land use sense, was portrayed as part of the problem – too much regulation as opposed to too little had thwarted economic growth and development.

With a general election scheduled for 2010 and a likely change of government to follow as well as a recession, many lobbyists and sectoral interests took the opportunity to propose planning reform. There was a remarkable degree of consistency in the agendas for reform, including the following:

• abolition of green ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title Page
• series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• List of acronyms
• 1 Change and planning
• 2 The rise and fall of the consensus on planning
• 3 New understandings A reinvigorated and fragmented left
• 4 New understandings A reinvigorated and unified right
• 5 From New Right to neoliberal spatial governance
• 6 A new ethos
• 7 A new politics for planning
• 8 New spaces and scales
• 9 Localism, the Big Society and austerity planning
• 10 Conclusions
• Bibliography
• Index