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This section continues the arguments developed in the previous two sections on national policy reform and deregulation by arguing that the ‘speed’ of the planning application process is a poor measure of planning ‘performance’ when compared with the quality and sustainability of the new developments being produced; countering the neoliberal logic that efficiency is the key objective of planning reform.

Overall, SPs expressed the view that, despite the government fixation, planning application decision-making speed was often an ‘artificial measure’ of performance. The main arguments made by the PMs for this position were that; 1) decision-making speed does not automatically provide any guarantee of quality of outcome; 2) that a council’s permission/application refusal ratings would provide a more appropriate measure of performance; and 3) that decision speed/target systems often led to ‘perverse’

consequences and ‘cheating’ that distorted the actually quality of the service that was being provided:

“[Decision-making speed] that is a very artificial measure, in my view…I can remember the old days of Planning Delivery Grant where decision was king; refusal, grant, split-decision or whatever, but decision was king on that day. So our refusal percentage was significantly higher then than it is now, but we got it out on time. You talk to an applicant, a developer, an agent, “Were you happy with your service?”. Well you got your refusal within seven weeks and six days, so that’s great, isn’t it? We are ticking our box. “Well, no, because I got a refusal”. Or authorities that were issuing letters which were basically saying withdraw it or we will refuse it, which is Hobson’s choice. Again, a) that is not a service, and b) that is not what people want and that isn’t what development is about. So the speed thing, all the developers that I have spoken to, on major applications if you say, “Would you rather have a decision within 13 weeks that could be either way, or we can just carry on working with you to get an approval which might take 16 weeks”, they will all take that one without fail.

It is just such an artificial measure” (SP13, Urban, East Midlands).

“[T]he government’s approach to measurements by performance is absolutely time based, and is a very poor measure of performance in my view…The objective of the customer is to get to the point where they can build something, and that isn’t always the most efficiently achieved by just the fastest bit of paper i.e. permission. Many of our applications are built within 22 days, because that is the minimum that it can be done in, so well inside any government target; but many of our applications are considerably over the government target because that is the right thing to do with that particular application, and it’s foolish to try and do it quicker than is in anyone’s interest” (SP15, Urban, West Midlands).

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There was a clear tension for SPs between meeting the imposed national targets for processing an application and making a decision (speed) and achieving the best quality of decision and a positive outcome for the applicant, mediated by a professional concern with ‘getting it right’. As such, PMs embraced the importance of speed as part of providing an efficient ‘customer service’ so that development could happen, but strongly rejected that it was the most important factor in the process.

The general sentiment was summed by SP2 that, “I have never disagreed with the idea that we should deal with planning applications as quickly as we possibly can, but I will always argue that speed does not always necessarily lead to quality” (Rural, South East). For them, planning performance agreements (PPAs) were an important tool to mitigate these speed/outcome practice tensions because they put “a sensible timescale to major developments that are so important to get right” and counter-act the “lack of reality in central government around the complexity of dealing with major planning applications”.

SP2 highlighted this point through the example of a strategic housing site for 2,350 homes that had to be processed according to a nine-month PPA; “we are talking about a major, major site on the edge of the biggest town in the Cotswold district, and it’s really important that we get that right and don’t just end up with another faceless housing estate on the side of a historic market town” (Rural, South East).

Professional understandings of ‘place-making’ (RTPI), and value of maintaining the historical and design character of existing areas through new developments, are the most significant factors for planners rather than speed of determination. These tensions over speed and outcomes highlight the competing priorities and interests of built environment stakeholders that together need to mobilise their different resources, knowledge and skills in the development process (Healey, 1992, Adams and Tiesdell, 2012).

The PMs strongly argued that the speed of the planning application process was not the main or only problem, making the case that rather than obsessing over speed, the government should focus more on “the percentage of applications approved as the measure of success” (SP 13, Urban, East Midlands).

In this respect it is more important for the government to try and understand the issues behind and reasons why a particular LPA has a prevalent high permission refusal rates; “[t]here are many other things that should be focused on, for example there are still many authorities who are absolutely awful at actually accepting that the growth is happening and properly planning for it, I would much prefer to see planning authorities judged on their ability to do that” (SP15, Urban, West Midlands). For these SPs, the government was looking for solutions in the ‘wrong places’, with levels of (eventual) positive determination being a more suitable measure of performance. However, the PMs acknowledged that speed was consistently given prominence over quality as a metric by government because speed can

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be quantitatively measured to form statistical performance indicators and used to compare LPAs;

whereas a ‘qualitative’ measure of planning decision-making performance would be far more complex:

“I can see why government are doing it [focussing on application speed as the best planning performance indicator], if you are measuring something nationally, it is very difficult to do it on a more qualitative basis” (SP15, Urban, West Midlands).

“[T]his has been a bugbear for years now, I don't know who is telling the government that speed is all important. Every time we talk to applicants, whether they be your local agents, your individuals, your majors, the one thing they all want is a favourable outcome. Why wouldn't you? If you have invested a lot of money in an application the last thing you want is a quick decision for refusal. So we have always sought to work with applicants to get the right decision for them. Not just get a quick decision. But it is the easy thing to measure;

that is the trouble, speed is the easy thing to measure. It is very difficult to measure the quality of the decision. But here we are again, you know, with government changes based around speed, I'm not seeing the evidence that that is the important thing. It is perceived to be, but I'm not sure it is…we want to be one of the best performing authorities, but also we want to get it right…not just doing things quickly” (SP16, Mixed, West Midlands).

These practice-based accounts underscore the long-standing tension between ‘process’ and ‘outcomes’

in planning theory (Fainstein and Campbell, 2012). They question the government’s desire to measure planning ‘quantitatively’ through statistics and an ‘instrumental rationality’ model, as opposed to more political/technical qualitative ‘value-based’ judgements that are more difficult to objectively measure.

The main arguments presented here is the pragmatic need to give both process (speed) and outcomes (quality) due decision-making weight, regardless of the prevailing national policy and target framework.

In practice, however, this is difficult for planners working under neoliberal reforms that distrusts the local state and seeks to either control them through targets or bypass them through policy deregulation.

Furthermore, SPs also argued that basing planning performance only on speed often led to ‘cheating’,

‘odd behaviour’ and ‘perverse’ decision-making in practice. In this context, the case was made that

‘creative practices’ were often used to stall the process until the application deadlines, which resulted in higher refusals levels and reduced negotiations/extensions as a means to simply meet the targets:

“[I]t was very clear that, you know, the whole thing about targets was that targets make you cheat; and actually what was happening was most of our determinations were happening on day 56, so in terms of the planning officers dealing with their caseloads they were leaving them all until the eighth week [deadline]. Now whether they could have determined them much sooner than that, but it was all on day 56, so there was a huge peak of decision-making activity” (SP6, Rural, South East).

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“[T]hose authorities that tend to get to the top of the government’s performance table…they work in a specific sort of way and it works for them. It means they perform very well statistically, but they also get a lot of very odd behaviours and a lot of waste in their systems, or a huge amount of inefficiency at the same time; because they have a much higher level of refusals, they have a much higher level of withdrawn applications, and they have overall much less customer satisfaction. And that demand in the system just gets re-looped and re-fed back into the system elsewhere” (SP15, Urban, West Midlands).

“There used to be all manner of creative practices which we had go on to get things done in eight weeks; everything from stopping the clock when you were negotiating something, through to not starting it at the beginning of the process, through to effectively not signing the decision notice on the day the decisions were actually made. It was all perverse outcomes of chasing a target that was eight weeks, but none of the outcomes, I don't think anybody would have signed up to any of the outcomes being a preferable outcome…It feels like a bit of a throwback to the ‘bad old days’ of the [New Labour] ‘best value’ indicators and, you know, the old eight week targets that just produced perverse decision making. Yes, you have a quick decision and get refused, but you get a quick decision. Well, how does that serve anybody?” (SP16, Mixed, West Midlands).

Overall, these practice accounts highlight the problems with excessive government focus on ‘process’

through decision-making speed and efficiency as the measures of effective planning performance, that need to be achieved through continuous reforms, against planning outcomes based on professionalism:

‘Any tightening of the time taken to determine planning applications seems to reduce the capacity for local authority planners to negotiate, consult, mediate and conduct the activities which allow them to add value to the DM process through notions of professional expertise. Indeed, the exercise of such discretionary judgement (apparently in pursuit of wider public goals) is seen as intrinsically linked to the notions of planning’s professionalism in the UK’ (Clifford, 2016, p. 385-6).

Despite acknowledgment across the board that speed and efficiency are important factors for providing a planning ‘service’, the desire for good quality planning outcomes linked to planners professional skills, such as high quality design standards, as well as reaching an acceptable positive determination for the client, was viewed as far more important to PMs than the time taken to make a decision on an application. Therefore the abolition of the performance-based audit and target systems for LG/LPAs by the Coalition can be viewed as a positive reform to planning under localism; however, the overarching central government demand for ‘speed’ and ‘efficiency’ has not changed post-2010. Instead different carrot-and-stick incentives have replaced the previous formalised targets, such as the threat of an LPA being placed into ‘special measures’ for consistently missing speed targets over a two year period. Thus successive UK governments have given ‘process’ prominence in the form of LPAs processing a planning application in 8 weeks for a ‘minor’ and 13 weeks for a ‘major’ application; despite the local evidence

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that suggests this measure of performance does not necessarily lead to the best ‘outcomes’, both for the developers that want a positive decision and the LPAs to ‘shape places’ (Adams and Tiesdell, 2012).

Overall, the findings from the three main parts in this section (4.1.1, 4.1.2 and 4.1.3) have demonstrated that; 1) SPs viewed the principle of the NPPF as a positive attempt to simplify the planning system;

however, that in practice this simplification led to increased policy uncertainty and greater challenges to planning professionalism from stakeholders as the planning system had become more flexible, interpretative and negotiable; 2) LPAs and planners are in a weaker position to negotiate planning gains with developers on behalf of their communities’ post-2010 because of viability considerations; 3) the small potential pay-offs of piecemeal planning deregulations were viewed as far outweighed by the harm such policies could cause to localities; and 4) the speed of the planning application process is a poor measures of planning performance when compared with the quality and sustainability of the new developments being produced. These practice-based criticisms revolved around professional, technical and public interest planning concerns, such as for sustainability, design and communities. The main argument here, returning to Ellis (2015), is that national policy deregulations/targets means planning is less powerful in relation to the market and so offers fewer opportunities for planners to make progressive interventions and counter neoliberal reforms that seek to water-down their professional autonomy, skills and objectives. Together these structures clearly delineate the boundaries of agency.

In practice, this structural context of pro-development national planning policy reform, deregulation and performance had the potential to clash with the parallel and wider public sector governing strategy of ‘localism’. The next section therefore moves on to examine the experiences and responses of PMs to developing forms of ‘community’ and ‘economic’ localism in relation to planning practices post-2010.