Sticking to the Script? The Co-production of Neighbourhood Planning in England.

His research centres on planning and land-use conflict in urban and rural areas and he has published extensively on citizenship and participation in planning.

Neighbourhood planning is arguably the most radical innovation in UK local governance in a generation, with over 2,200 communities in England now involved in statutory development planning at the neighbourhood level. Following incremental policy reforms, we argue that neighbourhood planning has reached a critical juncture where the future of the initiative is at stake. In this paper we reflect on existing research to assess the policy to date before imagining what an optimised version of the policy might look like. Despite being a state-led initiative, central government has failed to provide an image of success for neighbourhood planning which we argue has held back widespread innovation and progressive participation. We therefore outline a normative guide against which future iterations of neighbourhood planning might be assessed, and employ this in order to imagine a more comprehensive form of neighbourhood governance.

Despite intermittent recognition of the input of private planning consultants in the UK planning system, there remains a paucity of empirical studies into their roles and influence in contemporary practice. Drawing on interviews with both public and private planners in England, this paper explores the nature of the public-private entanglements that increasingly define local planning practice. These include the heterogeneity of the consultant market, the rationales employed to justify consultant use, the nature of the expertise being deployed, and the asymmetrical nature of public/private relationships. The paper argues that the demands made on the public planning system and the planners that operate it are driving teleological explanations of the use of private expertise, displaying an ambivalence to the fact that Local Planning Authorities are in a position of critical dependency with private sector consultants. In concluding, it is argued that the knowledges that underpin planning practices are increasingly shaped by the market, with the potential to undermine planning's public interest purpose.