11 - Conclusions: Reorganising the future of public interest planning?

Summary

This book has explored the ways in which spatial planning in the UK has been reorganised over recent decades. By focusing on processes of organisational change and restructuring, and their consequences for the work that planners do, we have interrogated the remaking of British planning from a novel and previously overlooked perspective, countering tendencies within planning scholarship to see practice in terms of either the latest government reform initiative, or the ethical agency and situated judgements of individual planners. Although focused on charting the contemporary landscape of UK planning, the themes and issues discussed here are of wider relevance, given the hegemonic neoliberal remaking of the state which, however unevenly, has played out internationally, with significant implications for regulatory activities, including in relation to the management of built and natural environments.

We have shown how the work professional planners do, once synonymous with public sector employment, has been subject to a series of changes rooted in the neoliberal remaking of state and society, and the growing economic power of landowners and developers in the UKs property- led accumulation regime. The headline figure motivating the book is the remarkable growth of private sector employment of planners, from less than 20 per cent at the end of the 1980s to around 50 per cent by 2023. This transformation has been driven by growing demand for expert advice to navigate the regulatory complexities of planning systems, resulting in increasing numbers of ‘consultants and other experts operat[ing] in liminal governance spaces between private markets and the formal planning system’ (Raco et al, 2016: 218).

Alongside this growth in work directly serving private clients, public sector planning has been subject to a seemingly permanent managerial revolution that has sought to introduce new forms of commercial savvy and discipline into the workplace. Exacerbated by the strictures of austerity, this has generated an increasingly fluid and fragmented organisational landscape marked by increasing concern for financial revenue, precarious working and considerable work intensification. All of these changes have been enabled by the commodification of professional work which has increasingly been standardised and packaged up so that it can be understood as a tradeable good that can be bought, sold or re- engineered to squeeze more from less as part of a seemingly insatiable quest for (so- called) efficiency.