Laffin, Martin

Planning in England : New Public Management, Network Governance or Post-Democracy? - Los Angeles : Sage, June 2016

Three frameworks – New Public Management, Network Governance and Post-Democracy – are applied to identify and explain the direction of institutional travel in the field of land-use planning in England. These frameworks are used to assess the extent to which land-use planning has been centralized or decentralized over the last 20 years. The last Labour government (1997–2010) is contrasted with the Conservative-led Coalition government (2010–2015). Labour introduced planning policies and an underpinning regional administrative machinery that the latter has replaced with a ‘localist’ planning system and sub-regional Local Enterprise Partnerships. The article concludes that both Labour and the Conservative-led Coalition embarked on policies that involved increased centralization, but that the centralization took different forms, though both parties denied sub-state institutions the political or other resources to challenge the central government in Westminster