Participation and active citizens

During the research on New Labour and planning reform, the topic of public participation cropped up in conversation. “Ah”, said the planner, “when I was doing my planning course we had a Canadian planner come to chat to us, as they were ahead of us in terms of public participation in those days. He told us how terrible it was, that the only thing they could get done was plant trees, because nobody objected to that, and that seems to me a danger of where we are headed in this country.” The planner then smiled wryly before adding, “well actually in the last couple of weeks I have had several letters from local residents complaining that decomposing leaves from trees along the streets are falling onto their cars and damaging the paintwork. So we can't even plant trees any more.”

The image of almost a ‘tyranny of participation’ from the eyes of a planner is fascinating given how efforts at making British planning more participatory have formed a central part of the planning reform agenda promoted by central and devolved government in Britain under both Labour and the Coalition since 1997 (Kitchen and Whitney, 2004; Gallent and Robinson, 2012). As reviewed in Chapter One, this seemingly pro-participation agenda is in conflict with other government priorities (see also Baker et al, 2007). Given these tensions, there is a clear need to explore what planners at the coalface think about public participation.

Just as the requirements of targets present a ‘top-down pressure’ on public sector professionals such as planners, so participation presents a ‘bottom-up’ check on their discretion (Taylor and Kelly, 2006). Participation is not the only such bottom-up check, however. As introduced in Chapter One, there has been a rise in the use of the language and ideal of ‘the customer’ across public services in recent years, particularly in the local government context in which planning sits. This idea of ‘the customer’ grew from John Major's 1991 ‘Citizen's Charter’ (Bolton, 2002) and continued under Labour administrations, the ideal of the customer being central to new public management (Clarke, 2004).