Discretion, flexibility, and certainty in British planning: Emerging ideological conflicts and inherent political tensions

In Britain, as the nature of the state’s involvement in the spatial planning process changed to reflect political concerns (such as the need for employment-generating development or concern for the environment), so have the methods employed by the government to secure consistency, certainty, and continuity in policy execution. A desire to create more certain conditions for developers, the public, and investors through greater use of plans has both decreased discretionary decision making and shifted it from some parts of the spatial planning process to others. Since certainty has formed the underlying tenet to statutory changes to the planning system after 1990 and has found policy expression through national planning guidance, British planning could now be at the juncture of an unhappy ideological conflict between the discretionary nature of British planning and the more certain, less pragmatic forms of spatial planning. In this paper, I suggest that the changing political context of planning in the 1980s and 1990s has led to an ideological conflict in the operation of spatial planning, which involves issues related to administrative law, professionalism, and flexibility and certainty. Mark Tewdwr-Jones is a senior lecturer In th