7 - Commercialisation and planning

Summary

Local government is now more actively income generat[ing] because we’re facing so many cuts, £30 million cuts means that I either have to sack all my staff or say to my staff ‘I’m sorry, you’re going to have to pay at least part of your wage by generating income’.

Interviewee 11 – Senior Planner, Local Authority

Introduction

The future has, of course, always been at the heart of planning thought. In the immediate postwar period, this was to be determined by planners advising political representatives, an understanding of planning that found itself in ideological harmony with prevailing governance common sense about the role of the state in proactively driving change. As disillusion with modernist planning grew, however, planning's grip on tomorrow became a little less sure, a trend only exacerbated by the rise and rise of neoliberalism and its attendant new common sense. The discussion of commercialisation in this chapter shows this shift, whereby planners now make the future on other people's terms, in the starkest light possible, clearly demonstrating how statutory planning in England is increasingly driven by logics that are alien to its founding aims and driving justifications.

Conceptually, the commercialisation of public sector planning in England is rooted in the changes brought by the rise of the New Right during the 1970s and 1980s, further enabled by the consolidation into the 1990s of NPM as a governmental technology (Clifford and Tewdwr- Jones, 2013). In this context it means that certain state functions come to be seen as marketable services and treated as such, with new regimes of fees and charges, and the constitution of quite different relationships between planners and publics, understood through a client/ customer matrix. In planning this understanding became consolidated in the 2000s, finding expression in key governmental initiatives like the Killian- Pretty Review (2008) in England, which drew together a number of previously existing discourses – against slowness, bureaucracy and complexity – to explicitly argue for greater ‘customer focus’, customers here being primarily those applying for planning permissions.