ANNUAL CONGRESS 2025

Special measures in planning: perverse incentives and inadvertent consequences

Not scheduled

20m

Yildiz Technical University, Istanbul

Oral Track 04 | GOVERNANCE

Speaker

Mrs Hannah Hickman (University of the West of England)

Description

The role of performance indicators in planning has a long history (Clarke and Wilson 1994, Haughton 1997). This work has largely concluded that indicators introduced for planning have been either administrative in nature or “of dubious value” (Haughton, 1997, 1) as effective measures of planning performance. Nevertheless, Governments across the political spectrum, and in many parts of the globe (Seasons, 2008), continue to adjust the ways by which the performance of local authority / municipal planning departments is monitored and assessed (Yetano, 2009), with consequential rewards and potential punitive actions.
One such action was the introduction, via the 2013 Growth and Infrastructure Act, of a new system of ‘special measures’ for Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) in England deemed as under-performing. This designation means that an LPA has been judged by Central Government to be underperforming on either the speed of applications determined within the statutory determination period or the quality of applications, assessed by a proxy measure of decisions subsequently overturned at planning appeal.
The deployment of special measures signals a particular direction in local authority planning performance measurement and can be seen as part of a more interventionist approach to performance management between the central and local state in relation to planning in England. Whilst local authorities with a designation receive a range of support measures from Government to support improved practice, there are significant consequences for on-going under-performance including central government take over of planning functions. Importantly, whilst a local authority is in special measures, a developer can choose for their application to be determined centrally via the planning inspectorate, bypassing democratic decision making at the local level.
Drawing on the first empirical study of the advent of special measures in England, this paper explores the impact of the new directive on local authority culture and practice. It does so via in-depth interviews with each of the six local authorities subject to special measures to date. In particularly, it exposes some of the preserve incentives at work in the designation and the inadvertent consequences of special measures for behaviour both within and beyond the local authority (including by developers). It also highlights the ongoing challenge of finding meaningful metrics by which planning performance is judged: judgements which reflect planning outcomes as well as process. More broadly, it contributes to wider debates about the reworking of central-local government relations and levels of local autonomy in reality.

References

Clarke, G.P. and Wilson, A.G., 1994. Performance indicators in urban planning: the historical context. Modelling the City: Performance, Policy, and Planning. Routledge: London, pp.4-19.

Haughton, M., 1997. Performance indicators in town planning: much ado about nothing? Local Government Studies, 23 (2), 1-13.
Seasons, M., 2003. Monitoring and Evaluation in Municipal Planning: Considering the Realities. Journal of the American Planning Association, 69 (4), 430–440.

Yetano, A., 2009. Managing performance at local government level: The cases of the city of Brisbane and the city of Melbourne. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 68 (2), pp.167-181.