Discipline of planning policy in the UK Assignment

Discipline of planning policy in the UK - Assignment Example This paper is intended to explain the national, regional and local framework for planning policy and practice identifying the main instruments for plan making in the UK. The paper focuses on particular policies relating to sustainable urban regeneration and critically examines the impact which these polices have had on a selected city in England.The salient feature of the UK planning system consists in a paradox – being born and clearly rooted in local government practice (Cherry, 1988, p.72) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, it tended to be highly centralised over the time, but in contrast with many other countries, there is a lack of a spatial plan at national level (Balchin, Sykora and Bull, 1999, p.89). It may have its origins in the British governmental system which, as Cherry writes (1988, p.183) is generally characterised by three-component, interactive structure providing periodic responses to demand for reform and innovation. The first element is the bureaucracy (local government and the civil service) which is conservative in terms of outlook; the second are the active pressure groups – reformist in nature; and the third element is represented by the elected politicians who decide policy and implement the taken decisions. Given this scenario, planning regulations are categorically a political act and represent the outcome of conflict/degree of compromise between competing views. Plan making itself, being considered not just a technical activity, but deeply political, deriving legitimacy from values expressed in the community, has become a highly sophisticated process of complex bargaining and negotiation, in which powerful interests (including professions) ‘both mediate and promote their preferences’ (Cherry, 1988, p.184). There are three distinctive patterns of policy that dominated the post-war Britain, and which have left their imprint in the field of planning – the concept of welfare state manifested in the redistributive policies and decentralist land use strategies particularly characteristic of the period between the 1940s and 1970s; the significant neo-liberal shift in the 1980s characterised by interventionist practices – market-driven, ad hoc, piecemeal and responsive to particular pressures, with certain limitations on local government practice in terms of strategic role and oversight on town and environmental planning (Cherry, 1988, p.1