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This chapter considers that even when planning services have not been outsourced, they are increasingly subject to the pressures of commercialisation which have impacted local government in an era of super-austerity. The logics driving these changes are arguably counter to those that underpin planning as an activity. Combining an overview from our focus group and desk data with rich detail from our ethnographic work, we explore the multiple forms this takes, such as ideas about planning services becoming revenue neutral through fee-raising work, new conceptions of customers and clients, ideas about local authority wholly owned companies and development arms, and the implications for what it means to provide public planning services in this changed context. A central place is given to planner perspectives on these changes and the implications of the UK’s uneven development geographies.
This chapter explores the somewhat overlooked trends around commodifying and casualising planning work. Starting with exploring the justifications for the increasing commodification of planning into work ‘packages’ which might be delivered by private consultants, we then turn to consider how such commodification enables planning staff to be perform roles regardless of their connection to a place and whether or not there is a particular vocational commitment to working for that place. This is exemplified by the increasing use of agency staff within local authorities rather than permanent employees. We argue that this is changing internal work relations and, arguably, reducing the traditional notions of place attachment and organisational loyalty which might have once been considered to typify local authority planning. For agency staff themselves, it also changes the way that they, as professional planners, shape their careers. These issues are explored in this chapter. Drawing in particular on our focus group and biographical interview material, we consider the consequences of the casualisation of working conditions in planning.
In this concluding chapter, we return to the idea of the ‘delivery state’, summarising how processes of privatisation, commercialisation and commodification have shaped a particular, narrow configuration of the public interest purposes of planning, organised around the imperatives of delivery and therefore tending to exclude anything that risks problematising the efficient facilitation of development. Bringing the strands of our argument together allows us to show how the various chapters of the book have developed a novel and critical perspective on the dominant contemporary culture of neoliberalised planning in the UK. Moving beyond this critical analysis, we go on to argue that there is an urgent need for broader debate about the forms of planning required to respond to key societal challenges from the housing crisis to the nature and climate emergencies. We conclude by offering some possible directions for renewing the public interest purposes of planning.
Spatial planning is at a crossroads, with government reform undermining the traditional vision of state-employed planners making decisions about urban development in a unified public interest. Nearly half of UK planners are now employed in the private sector, with complex inter-relations between the sectors including supplying outsourced services to local authorities struggling with centrally-imposed budget cuts.
Drawing on new empirical data from a major research project, ‘Working in the Public Interest’, this book reveals what it’s like to be a UK planner in the early 21st century, and how the profession can fulfil its potential for the benefit of society and the environment.
This chapter sets out the context for spatial planning across the UK, introducing key debates about the nature of professional expertise in planning and its relationship to both the state and the idea of the public interest. Drawing attention to the recent growth of private sector planning, we introduce the book’s distinctive focus on the organisational contexts through which planning expertise is now provided and why this transformation of a traditionally public sector activity matters. We then outline some key pressures that have driven these changes, considering the impacts of neoliberalisation and managerialisation, and the related processes of commodification, privatisation and commercialisation. In doing so, we introduce the concepts that frame our analysis across the book and introduce our core argument: that recent years have seen wider political questions about the value of planning subordinated to a technocratic focus on the efficiency of planning processes and the market-led ‘delivery’ of development.
This chapter looks beyond spatial/town planning to the wider literature on work and organisations. We draw on literature that critically explores the nature of contemporary knowledge work, unpacking positive and more insidious implications of current trends. We see, for example, how an emphasis on employee autonomy develops alongside ‘neo-Taylorist’ micromanagement with consequences that are concerning in relation to the planning system’s ability to service the public interest. We highlight the need to explore everyday practice in organisations as a means to understanding the implications of these forces, drawing attention to recent calls for scholarship on the ‘foot soldiers’ in planning organisations. This treatment serves as a basis for our discussion, in Chapter 8, of the impact of these developments on everyday professional planning work in the public and private sectors as seen through our empirical research.
This chapter provides an overview of how public planning services are being unevenly privatised through multiple organisational forms and practices, considering the ways that some authorities have fully outsourced to the private sector or their own companies, while most outsource some planning work to private consultancies. Utilising data including focus group and desk survey results, we show how the delivery of planning services has become more complex, characterised by changing hybrid public-private arrangements and how this has been intensified by austerity, including public planning services increasingly operating to private logics. We also turn our gaze to look at the private sector in planning in more detail. With nearly half of the UK’s chartered town planners now working in the private sector, we seek to explore this understudied organisational landscape, highlighting the way in which private consultancies differ considerably in terms of their size, scope and working practices.
