What must planners do differently?
Commercialisation: Roll up! Roll up! Planning services for sale
A bike path under construction in a new development. © WITPI
With budgets decimated by austerity, local government planners face a dilemma. Should they cut services? Sweat staff? Outsource their operations? Beg for mercy?
Commercialisation is an approach that seeks to protect planners’ work without the loss of control that has limited the uptake of wholesale outsourcing of planning services (Ref 4). Commercialisation aims to create lean departments that offset their costs through marketisation. Applicants become clients buying services. Pre-application advice and Planning Performance Agreements (PPAs) are particularly important, but some may look to sell services to other authorities or set up trading arms. At the far end of the commercialisation continuum the aim is cost neutrality, calculating fees to cross-subsidise activities like policy making and enforcement.
"Why can’t we be the place that they would always come to? We can give them great service, good value for money. If somebody else can do that, we can do that!" - Public sector planner
Advocates of commercialisation highlight a range of positive outcomes. A new focus on pre-application advice allows planners to exert influence early in the design process. Through Planning Performance Agreements, this influence can continue as projects unfold. For planners, this can feel like doing planning work "in spite of the system", which has been modified over recent decades to limit their agency.
"We’ve had first-class and second-class stamps for 100 years, haven’t we? Just because, someone’s paid for a PPA or for pre-app advice, there’s no guarantee they get planning permission, you know?" - Public sector planner
Commercialisation also allows planners to show that they are on board with a new, more constructive, delivery focussed culture. Commercially minded planners disdain the apparently obstructive attitudes of the past, and in being 'solutions-focussed' can perform their rebuttal to narratives that criticise planners as archetypal unyielding bureaucrats putting the brakes on progress. At the same time they argue that commercialisation is also good value for the public. If developers make healthy profits, why shouldn’t they cover the full costs of the services they receive?
Sceptics can respond by pointing to the potential for conflicts of interest, as planners begin to rely on selling services to the very organisations they exist to regulate. The cloak of commercial confidentiality means that commercialised pre-application discussions shut the non-fee paying public out of the process, reducing transparency and inclusion. Where planners are firm in their professional resolve and supported by strong organisational cultures one might argue that there isn’t a problem, but how healthy are planning cultures? That planners have been unable to make the case for the wider value that good planning creates and have thus ended up focussing narrowly on the immediate costs of activities such as plan-making may bode ill in this regard, especially as we face a significant post-COVID19 recession.
Planners in the private sector, perhaps wary of new competition, are quick to suggest that public sector commercialisation is exploiting a monopoly position. They raise questions about the quality of services developers now pay significantly more for. Is the same old stuff being flogged off with a new label and price tag?
"At the end of the day, someone gets planning permission, that’s a private benefit. Why would you pay for that with public money? So, I think we should be billing for everything." - Public sector planner
More practically, whilst commercialisation can work in places with high development pressure, such as south east England, questions remain over its viability in areas where development is less profitable and/or the impact of austerity even greater. Relatedly, if new posts are tied to generating income understandings of professional purpose could be fundamentally altered. What value do we put on a non fee-earning policy planner’s role within a local authority? Ultimately we might wonder whether this points to a more fundamental problem with the approach, as commercialisation pushes local authorities into competition with one another to attract development.
The commercial shift might also represent planning’s role in what we term ‘the delivery state’ – local government reimagined as fundamentally concerned with ‘delivering’ development for its area, relegating other concerns about the longer term sustainability of this approach. This is a distinct approach to spatial development, but is it planning? Whilst planners take various positions on the benefits of commercialisation, then, they are united in seeing a difficult wider context.
Key questions
Is commercialisation the future or the latest stop on a concerning direction of travel: a shift from serving the public interest to servicing the development industry, which finds planners questioning their roles, second guessing what they can and can’t do, and wondering whether they are selling their souls to the devil? If commercialisation does need to be challenged, a possibly even trickier question might be asked: just what is the wider value of planning today and how can planners make the case for it?