Speaker
Description
Legitimacy and planning law – the case of National Development Management Policies in England
In England’s discretionary planning system development management policies (DMPs) are core components of local development plans and decision making on planning applications. The elaboration of DMPs has traditionally been the preserve of local planning authorities. Under the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 (LURA) the UK Government has granted itself powers to introduce new National Development Policies (NDMPs) to sit alongside the more generally drawn guidance in the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF). Such NDMPs, it has been indicated, will cover a range of planning issues, apply across England with statutory weight, and trump the orientations of existing local development plans and their locally adopted DMPs when national and local DMPs conflict. This paper presents the findings of work undertaken for the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) by the University of Liverpool and ARUP into the status and scope of NDMPs and how they might operate in England. It adopts a legitimacy-based framework under which legitimacy is seen to be composed of three dimensions: input – how far does policy reflect the expressed desires of the governed and society?; output – what is the problem-solving capacity of policies adopted?; and throughput – what is the quality of the governing processes that occur between input and output (e.g. are they inclusive, accountable, and transparent etc.)? Using this framework the paper argues that NDMPs will need to be closely monitored and scrutinised if these novel policies are to be developed and rolled out in a manner which ensures the legitimacy of planning policy is maintained.
References
RTPI (2023) NDMP Research Briefing (rtpi.org.uk)
Scharpf, F. (1999). Governing in Europe: Effective and Democratic?, Oxford University Press.
Schmidt, V. A. (2013) Democracy and legitimacy in the European Union revisited: input, output and ‘throughput’. Political Studies, 61(1), 2–22.
Sykes, O., Dembski, S., Power, K., Jones, J. and Ford, I. (2023), Research on National Development Management Policies, University of Liverpool for Royal Town Planning Insitute.
Sykes, O. & Sturzaker, J. (Eds) (2024) Planning in a Failing State: Reforming Spatial Governance in England. Bristol: Policy Press.
Taylor, Z. (2019) Pathways to legitimacy, Planning Theory, 18(2), 214–236.
| Keywords | Discretion; Legitimacy; Centralisation; Planning Law |
|---|---|
| Best Congress Paper Award | No |
