What must planners do differently?

Planning ethics: The need for a ‘do no harm’ principle to help secure the public interest?

Planning is important, having multiple impacts on all our lives, and so questions of how those who work as planners behave, and the consequences of their conduct, matter. Accusations of corruption in planning are not unusual. These often point to the idea that planners and/or local politicians have been bribed. There have been some cases of this, of course, such as the ‘Donnygate’ case from 1993 (Ref 6). Alongside cases of payments to influence planning decisions are accusations of improper influencing or decision-making involving conflicts of interest, including the recent case involving the Secretary of State as well as cases involving local authorities such as Westminster, Northumberland and North Cornwall Councils (Ref 7).

As important as issues of propriety are, is planning ethics just about avoiding taking bribes or not taking decisions which favour friends and acquaintances? Or should we think of ethics in a broader sense, in terms of what is right for society more generally? The professional status of planning ties the individual practitioner to ethics through their professional body. In the UK, there are the RTPI’s 2016 Code of Professional Conduct and the 2017 practice advice note on Ethics and Professional Standards (Ref 8). The 2016 code sets out core principles (competence, honesty and integrity; independent professional judgement; due care and diligence; equality and respect; and professional behaviour) which say nothing specific about planning outcomes at all and could almost apply to any profession (Ref 9).

The 2017 note offers some practical guidance, but contains the rather confused statement that “historically, acting in the public interest has been defined in terms of protecting public health, public amenity and the environment from ‘harm’. Nowadays RTPI Members serve a range of interests.” (Ref 10) Our own research through the WITPI project has found that the concept of the ‘public interest’ has somewhat a Humpty-Dumptyish quality, seeming to mean whatever each person wants it to mean, but it does remain a key point of reference for planners.

The whole justification for planning is surely that it serves broader society, intervening to move us beyond individual interests. This means planning should still seek to serve some sort of notion of a wider public interest rather than weakly saying it ‘serves a range of interests’, an extraordinary claim which seems to absolve planning professionals of any notion of responsibility higher than the desires of their employer or client. This is something which the American Planning Association has, arguably, a much stronger tradition of considering. In their Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct they state that “our primary obligation is to serve the public interest” and define this as including a “special concern for the long-range consequences of present actions”, giving “people the opportunity to have a meaningful impact on the development of plans and programs that may affect them”, seeking “social justice by working to expand choice and opportunity for all persons”, and promoting excellence “to conserve and preserve the integrity and heritage of the natural and built environment”. (Ref 11)

The reason a focus on planning outcomes should matter can be illustrated with reference to permitted development (PD) for office-to-residential change of use in England. This has led to a large volume of extremely poor quality housing, including units which are extremely small, with little access to any compensating amenity space, strange internal layouts and very poor natural light. (Ref 12) Given the housing crisis around affordable housing, many of the most vulnerable in society are forced to live in these inadequate units, with potential detrimental consequences for their mental health and wellbeing that have been brought into sharp focus during the Covid-19 enforced lockdowns.

The depressing thing has been the way that chartered town planners working in the private sector have been involved in many such schemes. Those professional planners might argue they are serving the interests of the clients they are advising, working within the law and helping deliver housing when there is a housing crisis. Yet, many of these schemes are widely recognised by a range of stakeholders as shockingly bad and are literally condemning inhabitants to lives of misery. Some planners shake their heads and agree whilst simultaneously arguing that they don’t set the rules and, if they don’t take the work, someone else will.

In the biographical interviews conducted as part of our WITPI project, five of the 23 interviewees (interestingly, all public sector practitioners) explicitly linked the notion of being a ‘professional’ with ethics. Some noted that their employers offered some scope not to get involved in projects they felt would contradict their professional ethics or values (eg, nuclear power station developments). But for the majority the lines were far less clear and certain; as Interviewee 9 said, “I think, to be a professional implies that you have a public interest at the heart of everything you do … but certainly, I think one of the problems with the planning profession is that people who call themselves planners are doing completely opposite things and … I think it feeds through to the RTPI because it has to have a foot in both camps.”

There are clearly difficulties and, in many planning applications, there may be chartered town planners on opposite sides of negotiations. Nevertheless, if planning is a meaningful area of professional activity, then professionalism should mean taking into account the impact of schemes which chartered planners are working on and being confident enough to critically examine these outcomes.

Key questions

Planners working on all sides of negotiations need a core set of planning principles and outcomes they are guided by. Should there be a ‘do no harm’ principle in planning as proposed in the TCPA’s Raynsford Review? Can planners from all sectors agree a common purpose and definition of what it means to serve the public interest?