A re-emergence of strategic planning in England?

By Professor Ben Clifford 
16 December 2024

Devolution White Paper proposals

The UK government have today published their much-trailed Devolution White Paper. This sets out plans for all of England to be covered by Strategic Authorities headed by regional Mayors, as already exists for places like Greater London, Cambridgeshire and Peterborough and the Liverpool City Region, with powers and funding related to transport, skills and employment, housing and planning, economic development, environment and climate change and with further possible roles relating to public health and public safety (policing and fire and rescue services).

Following a commitment in the Labour Party manifesto prior to their election to government last July, the White Paper now confirms the government’s intention that there should be a universal system of strategic planning, with ‘Spatial Development Strategies’ covering all parts of England.

The geography of these is that they will cover the mayoral strategic authority areas, with each of these areas expected to usually have a population of at least 1.5 million people.

At present, there are somewhat similar plans already covering Greater London (known as the London Plan) and Greater Manchester (known as Places for Everyone and not including Stockport which was able to withdraw from what was then a voluntary arrangement to produce a joint plan across ten local authorities ) with one for the Liverpool City Region under preparation (known as the LCR Spatial Development Strategy). There are currently no other of these strategic plans in place, including for existing devolved city regional Mayors like West Yorkshire.

A return to universal coverage of strategic spatial plans, which will consider issues such as infrastructure, areas for large scale development and housing targets across their geography, does have some echoes with the former Regional Spatial Strategies which were abolished through the Localism Act 2011. The geography will be different, with these generally being for smaller areas and with an intention for slimmer plans made more quickly, but the hope would appear to be for plans which can address some of the lack of strategic coordination which followed the abolition of RSS and support housing and infrastructure development and investment and economic growth.

Potential issues to consider

As part of our planning reform cluster at the UCL Bartlett School of Planning, we hosted a roundtable with 26 attendees from academia and public, private and third sector planning practice to discuss strategic planning in November, when the government’s direction of travel was already clear.

Our discussion started by noting that strategic planning can clearly take many forms and there are arguments around scale, geography and the degree to which they are formalised development plans as opposed to more informal vision documents. Internationally, there is increasing interest in strategic spatial planning as a form of investment and governance coordination. It will be interesting to see the emerging geographies of these new strategic planning areas and the degree to which they respond to differing functional geographies and provide an ability to plan around urban-rural interdependencies which are arguably becoming ever more important around issues like green energy and biodiversity net gain. That’s before we even get on to the thorny issue of whether they allow better coordination between London and the surrounding Greater South East of England than at present, for example in relation to the Metropolitan Green Belt.

A number of other key issues emerged through our discussion. Firstly, it will be important to see what the government’s priorities for this new generation of strategic spatial plans really are in practice. Will they truly seek to support integration across multiple government priorities or will they end up prioritising housing development and economic growth over other potential priorities such as low carbon transition, environmental enhancement and public health (what we might term the health of the public and the planet)? If coordination across multiple topics is seen as important, will there be sufficient powers for the devolved Mayors to ensure this happens? Making best use of data may help here. There is clearly a need for clarity on what are the objectives of these plans, what success will look like and how it will be measured.

There is also a need to consider the skills and resources needed to produce these plans. The White Paper talks about wanting to press ahead with producing these plans even before Strategic Authorities are in place, which may rely on County Councils taking a lead producing them in remaining areas of two-tier local government in England, yet with most planning work done by the district councils in these areas, and with all local authorities having suffered through nearly 15 years of super-austerity, important questions remain as to how there can be sufficient capacity to produce these new plans effectively and at the pace that the government seems to want. That’s before we even consider the capacity of statutory consultees like Natural England and the Environment Agency who will surely need to be involved in supporting the production of these plans. There are risks for planning’s reputation and status as an area of professional endeavour if the new strategic planning is seen as failing to deliver.

As emerged during our discussions, there are also risks that in practice the production of strategic plans could delay the lower level Local Plans or real large scale projects while they’re being prepared, so careful thought needs to be given to their implementation. Will the plans actually help address pressing issues like surrounding power and water infrastructure in the South East of England and allow coordination between local and nationally significant infrastructure project planning?

At the same time, while these are strategic plans, they are ultimately impacting people and change in their environment. It seems important that sufficient consideration is given to how effective community engagement can be facilitated at this scale and viewed as something that helps strengthen decision-making rather than a tick box burden.

Strategic planning is coming…

It is clear that a new age of strategic planning in England will soon be upon us. There are many opportunities in this agenda, and it is easy to highlight some of the disbenefits from not having had a larger than local formal planning framework for England since the Regional Spatial Strategies were abolished. In our roundtable discussion, there were a number of comments around the importance of working with the agenda as it emerges from central government over the coming months.

That said, there were also some other comments about the importance, particularly for the academics in the room, of providing critical engagement with this policy area. On a personal level, as we head into this, I think there is a need to reflect on experience from things like the London Plan as well as from strategic planning in Scotland and Wales to try and ensure the best chance of these plans not being seen as failing to achieve. There is also, arguably, a need to allow space for alternative voices and perspectives. There are currently interesting discussions around the potential for circular economies in Amsterdam, to take one of many potential examples. Will this new generation of strategic plans offer the opportunity for radical thinking about different approaches to meaningfully confront the multiple challenges facing us?

Find out more

Learn more about the Planning systems and planning reform research cluster. 
Read the first blog: Launching our cluster and a need for a focus on social housing delivery.