Planning and new labour

The period since 1997 is long enough to start to take stock of the experience of planning under the New Labour governments. It is long enough to be able to make some judgements about the successes and failures of planning during these years. This theme issue is designed to start this process. It seeks mainly to be a situating exercise, as the most important task now appears to be discussing the terms of debate. We are not in fact tackling, to any significant extent, the evaluative task mentioned above—that is beyond our means here. Our aim is much more modest, to bring together the two sides of the equation in the UK, New Labour and recent planning. We have found in setting about this task that very little has been written about this question. In comparison with the considerable reflection on Thatcherism/the New Right and planning that was emerging by the late 1980s, the absence of consideration of the relationships between this current pair is striking. Of course the present moment, in the midst of a major global economic crisis, may not be the best time to make any judgements about anything, as planning, along with everything else, looks to confront the new landscape emerging. These papers were written in their underlying forms before the unfolding of this crisis, so there is no risk here of any rewriting of the post-1997 period in the light of the crisis. This should be borne in mind in reading this theme issue. This introduction has four tasks. The last one, to sketch a few issues for further work, is predictable enough. (I will not try to summarize the papers here; the abstracts in themselves will give readers a flavour of where each is starting from and where it is going.) Before that, the three main tasks are to think a bit further about the situation we are in and the questions which orient this particular enquiry (certainly every planning academic and planner would approach this differently), to discuss briefly some of the issues missing from the following papers, and to pick up some of the cross-cutting themes arising from a reading of the papers. A separate commentary is provided by Klaus Kunzmann from an international perspective, giving a more distanced view of what has been going on in the UK backyard. This should prove a useful corrective to the insider views presented elsewhere in this issue