In a democracy, a commonly held idea is that political parties present their programmes for government before elections so that people know what they are voting for. It is then often held that governments should follow what they have said, when in government. These programmes may take several forms, but the most common one is the party manifesto. Here the aim is to consider how planning elements have figured in manifestos. Manifestos are surveyed from the four UK general elections 2010-2019, concentrating on those of the Conservative and Labour parties. How far did planning figure in manifestos? Were there big differences between parties and elections? To what extent did a winning party follow its manifesto? Manifestos tread a complicated line between clear ideological statements and more immediately tuned electoral political considerations. Some implications are drawn out for how planning actors may relate to manifestos in the future.

This article explores the political implications of conflicts over new housebuilding for Conservative -led governments in England since 2010. Revisiting debates about the tensions between neoliberal and more collectivist traditions within the political ideology of the Conservative Party, we argue that rather than blocking change this internal conflict should be seen as a dynamic part of the politics of planning. This leads us to propose that Conservative planning reforms have been characterised by a distinctive 'double shuffle' through which the party has sought to progress neoliberalising reforms whilst managing these tensions and seeking to maintain their hold on power through statecraft.

The primary ideologies are surveyed, taken to be the classic ideological composites, most centrally conservatism and socialism. Also introduced are several other kinds of ideological forces, primarily feminism, environmentalism and several dimensions of nationalism. These are then related in an initial manner to British planning, particularly that within England, concentrating on the periods of Conservative and Labour government in the last two decades. The significance of the classic left-right distinctions is brought out, whilst also stressing the importance in certain fields of the other ideological dimensions. These however generally have to build some relationship with one of the core ideological composites if they are to have a powerful impact on policy and practice at all levels of planning activity.

Not all activity in planning is political or ideological, evidently. This chapter explores two of the areas which may be thought less subject to political and ideological influences. One is the technical dimension of planning work, which includes a range of skills, from the “harder” aspects like design or regulations to the softer sides of negotiation and participatory techniques. This is seen as indeed having some autonomy, but also as in part tied into the political work of planners. A second aspect is the central importance of law in planning. This has been especially under-analysed, and a survey of approaches to this area is given, including the valuable analysis of Pierre Bourdieu. It is argued that there is again a separate sphere of legal discourse and power which is central to planning, but that this too has a strong ideological grounding. It is problematic for many people involved in planning that law complexifies and to an extent mystifies even simple planning matters.

The field of planning is briefly introduced, and it is argued that the failure of both planning practitioners and planning academics to engage with political and ideological aspects of planning has weakened the response of planners in the face of increasing attacks on planning in recent years. A discussion of the present moment in Britain suggests that this is a good time to engage afresh with these aspects. The chapter introduces relevant ways of analysing politics and ideology, drawing on political science thinking especially. It is argued that keeping the two aspects separate, politics and ideology, can give greater explanatory purchase. A framework is then proposed for how thinking in both these areas can be applied to a range of planning activities and fields.

The book has uncovered many aspects of the functioning of planning in England which are seen as highly dysfunctional in terms of achieving good results in planning. It has been argued that this is due in part to the ideological and political mis-structuring of planning. This chapter makes a range of suggestions as to how these problems could be addressed. It draws in part on a recent review of the planning system, the Raynsford Review. That Review argued for the strengthening of local government, to make it the key actor in guiding a strong planning system, and in implementing change in every field, especially to create affordable housing and address the climate crisis. The chapter extends these proposals, in areas such as finding ways to improve the media system locally for planning and the associated scope for improvement of public deliberation. There is also a need to regulate the lobbying and pressure group world, to create something a bit closer to a level playing field of influence on central and local planning.

Government is central to the activity of planning. Here the basic functioning of planning in England in central and local government is summarised. The place of planning as a part of public bureaucracies is analysed. It is argued that bureaucracy is a vital and valuable aspect of government, which can help to promote fair treatment and prevent corruption. However, planning is only in part a bureaucratic activity, as much of its work demands specific and creative responses to local circumstances. Analysis is then given of the operation of planning at the local level, identifying the role of local politicians and the formation of local political and ideological planning contexts. Case studies draw on Oxfordshire and Hampshire experience in recent decades. A final section analyses the ideological and political framing of the neighbourhood planning instituted in England in the last decade, identifying the weaknesses that this suffers from, as well as some potential for learning.

Marshall examines the ideological structuring of current planning models and the interplay of political interests. He analyses attempts at planning reform by recent governments to show how we can generate more effective political engagements for common gain.

Here three core fields of planning activity are analysed, to excavate the political and ideological forces in play in each case. The fields are housing, commercial development (industry, retail, warehousing) and infrastructure (transport, energy). It is argued that central ideological structuring is important in all three fields, given the power of central government financing and regulation in most areas. There is scope nevertheless for the formation of some variation in local political and ideological landscapes. This may affect for example local policies on housing or on welcoming or otherwise of economic development, or policies on retail investment. However this is generally constrained. In each field case examples are given from English localities, including town centre retail schemes, large warehousing projects, highway schemes and power station developments.

Part of the processes analysed in chapters 6 and 7 concerns the communication and mediation of ideas and policies. This is not an innocent or neutral process, but something which can affect deeply the content of any field being communicated and mediated. This chapter examines two dimensions of these activities. One focus is on the media, including the range of communication fields affecting planning. Particular study is made of the role of the press centrally and locally. The impending demise of the local press in Britain is studied, noting the problematic effects for the public understanding of planning. The second focus is on the actual and potential roles of public deliberation and participation. It is argued that there is scope to improve this considerably, working on the foundation of extensive experience built up nationally and internationally over recent decades.

In this chapter and chapter 10, different facets and fields of planning are analysed, in order to give examples of how political and ideological analysis of planning can be undertaken for particular types of planning. This chapter takes a critical look at three facets of planning activity, for heritage, local environmental matters and design quality. It is argued that these are key aspects of British planning, with extensive achievements on each dimension. But the perspective in each field is seen as ideologically conservative, raising the consideration of these facets above a range of social and deep environmental concerns, which can be crowded out by the skewing of the perspective on these considerations. This skewing is reinforced by the play of local and national pressure politics, which gives a high profile to especially heritage and light green issues. This can however vary significantly between localities, depending on local political cultures.

There have been discussions in a range of contexts of the links between spatial planning and actions on major infrastructure. Here this relationship is framed by considering the political, ideological and geographical drivers of state policies and actions in the fields of spatial planning and infrastructure. The empirical focus is a study of current large-scale spatial-planning activities in the UK over the last decade or so, largely within England. Analysis of these cases shows the importance of understanding planning and infrastructure together, given that the emerging initiatives on infrastructure and in big spatial planning are very much connected.

This Special Issue starts from the premise that the concept of ideology holds significant analytical potential for planning but that this potential can only be realised if ideology is brought to the fore of analysis. By naming ideology and rendering it visible, we hope to bring it out from the shadows and into the open to examine its value and what it can tell us about the politics of contemporary planning. The articles in this Special Issue therefore seek to contribute to established academic debates by exploring some of the ways ideology can be deployed as a tool in the analysis of planning problems. This article introduces the Special Issue by exploring the various accounts in the articles of (1) what ideology is; (2) what its effects are; (3) where ideology may be identified and (4) what different theories of ideology can tell us about planning. There inevitably remain many un-answered questions, paths not taken and debates left unaddressed. We hope other scholars will be inspired (or provoked) to address these omissions in the future.

The article examines the process whereby government and business elites have driven the expansion of London airports, particularly via the mode of the establishment of an independent' commission, the Davies Commission (2012-2015). It addresses the strategic framing of airports planning, including the role of National Policy Statements, and the nature of the consideration of the planning applications for consent to develop. Temporal and geographical dimensions are analysed, showing how central to the UK state project is the expansion of the southern English / Greater London core, with associated infrastructure geographies. It concludes that corporate and state power may well achieve the desired expansion of airport capacity in the London region, overriding environmental and other non-commercial considerations. However, there are tensions in the dominant state and business model, given an apparent commitment to carbon emissions reduction and other air quality goals, as well as to minimising the costs to the public sector which airport expansion is likely to generate.

Governments in many countries have sought to accelerate the time taken to make decisions on major infrastructure projects, citing problems of ‘delay’. Despite this, rarely has the time variable been given careful empirical or conceptual attention in decision-making generally, or in infrastructure decision-making specifically. This paper addresses this deficit by analysing decision-making on two categories of major infrastructure in the UK – transport and electricity generation – seeking both to generate better evidence of the changes to decision times in recent decades, and to generate insights from treating time as resource and tracking its (re)allocation. We find that reforms introduced since 2008 have done relatively little to alter overall decision times, but that there are marked and revealing changes to the allocation of time between decision-making stages. While public planning processes have their time frames tightly regulated, aspects led by developers (e.g. pre-application discussion) are not; arranging finance can have a bigger effect on project time frames, and central government retains much flexibility to manage the flow of time. Speed-up reforms are also sectorally uneven in their reach. This indicates how arguments for time discipline falter in the face of infrastructure projects that remain profoundly politicised.

This paper examines the practice in France since the 1990s in working towards decisions on major infrastructure. Whilst in some European countries the drive since that time has been to press faster decision-making and deregulation, in France the response to difficulties in progressing large infrastructure schemes was to move to more deliberative approaches, both at the project level and in relation to environmental issues as a whole. The paper considers these approaches alongside the growing literature on deliberative democracy, particularly that on deliberative systems. It is suggested that there is much scope to learn from the accumulated experience in these fields, which could help to provide a more considered, open and pluralist approach to infrastructure decisions, genuinely taking account of all alternatives, as against the tendency to move to a more demand driven and limited democracy approach which has been promoted in England and Wales in the UK and to a certain extent at EU level as well.

The European Union (EU) has been involved in influencing major infrastructure in the fields of transport and energy mainly by means of the Trans-European Networks (TENs) programme begun in the 1990s. Other macro-planning and wider spatial planning exercises, including the European Spatial Development Perspective, made reference to such infrastructure systems, particularly in relation to the need for connectivity and mobility, but normally did not attempt to intervene in an area seen as one of the prerogatives of national states. Much more important have been the wider programmes of liberalization pressed by the EU since the 1980s, but these have had no specific geographical content. A revision of the TENs programmes since 2008 has led to proposals to increase the role of the EU, by drawing up continent wide schemas indicating needs for future investment in many fields of both transport and energy, and introducing new procedures to streamline decision-making by designating projects as of European interest. The initiatives in transport and energy are described here, including the two Regulations currently under discussion within the EU institutions. These include major proposals for cross-European multi-modal transport corridors within an EU core network, and regional schemas for energy drawn up primarily by energy industries and government counterparts. Both are likely to be of real significance for spatial planners throughout the continent, and have major impacts on the shapes of future infrastructure networks. These proposals are analysed, as cases of the rescaling and re-ordering of government, giving more force to the EU in these fields, and reinforcing sectoral-or silo-based decision-making. It is argued that somewhat different outcomes will result in the few areas, such as the Baltic, where long-term macro-regional collaboration has been present, from the rest of Europe, where these sectoral programmes may complicate further the mix of planning impacting on each region, making even more confused the accountability of governance. Suggestions are made for the careful assessment of these schemas by national and regional governments, and for the creation of some spatial planning analytical capability at the EU level, which could examine this type of proposals, with powerful spatial impacts.