Spatial Planning and the New Localism by Graham Haughton Philip Allmendinger

Author:Graham Haughton, Philip Allmendinger [Graham Haughton, Philip Allmendinger]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780415483353
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Published: 2009-11-12T00:00:00+00:00

A Fully-Fledged Experiment Minus Democracy?

By the early 1990s, planning in the UK was generally re-emerging from the market-oriented legacy of the Thatcher era (Thornley, 1993) and regional planning was back on the agenda in England in the form of Regional Planning Guidance (RPG) (DoE, 1992a, 1992b) following the almost complete abandonment of strategy-making at this scale during the 1980s (Breheny, 1991; Wannop & Cherry, 1994). Varying forms of joint collaborations of local authorities had begun to emerge in some regions as bottom-up responses to cross-boundary strategic and regional economic development issues (Thomas & Kimberley, 1996). Further stimulus to better collaboration within regions such as the North West of England also came from pressure for local authorities and other regional stakeholders to jointly develop regionally agreed economic strategies and priorities in order to leverage regional structure funds from the European Union (Baker & Hebbert, 1995). However, the resulting RPG (issued by the Secretary of State and not by the regional associations themselves) remained resolutely wedded to a narrowly conceived land use focus without any real regional specificity (Minay, 1992) and was tightly controlled by central government (Baker, 1998).

At the sub-regional scale, various rounds of local government re-organization during the early 1990s had complicated the pattern of local government in England by creating a number of unitary authorities in the larger town and cities of the shires to match those already found in the major urban areas, where conurbationwide structure plans had been abolished with the Metropolitan Councils back in 1986. But elsewhere, a two-tier system of county councils and district councils prevailed, with county structure plans providing continued strategic policy direction. However, there was a growing feeling that the structure planning process had lost its way and needed reform. A government sponsored review of English structure planning exposed a number of weaknesses including a loss of strategic focus, over-lengthy processes of plan preparation and that the geographical coverage of the county councils seldom equated with strategic functional areas, such as city-regions (Baker & Roberts, 1999).

The pace of change accelerated considerably after the election of the first Blair Labour government in 1997. This was a period of transition. The new government took stock of, and reviewed, inherited institutional frameworks, policies and strategies within the context of a set of political ideologies that characterized the New Labour agenda. Notions of ‘third way’ politics, evidence-based policy, sustainability and modernizing government were to have a marked influence on the evolving institutional frameworks and planning systems operating in the UK.

TABLE 1. The English planning framework

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