Traditional clinical training has often lacked the leadership and management skills necessary for practitioners to effectively drive change. Despite facing systemic pressures and resource limitations, clinicians can be agents of change by innovating within their work environments. Practising self-care and understanding the benefits of Lifestyle Medicine are essential for healthcare practitioners to sustain their wellbeing and energy for these changes. The transformation of healthcare environments to encourage healthier choices can profoundly affect the wellbeing of both staff and patients. Large-scale change can be fostered by engaging with the community and connecting patients to local groups and activities. The UK has seen examples of successful Lifestyle Medicine projects and we explore some examples of success in this chapter. To innovate in healthcare, one must be clear about their motivation, be prepared to initiate projects without initial funding, plan for their evaluation, and ensure that the projects are enjoyable for all participants involved.

Introduction: A Developing Tune

This chapter focuses on law and music, emphasising the engagement by law and humanities scholars with popular music. It is in five parts. The first part identifies a long-standing ‘minor jurisprudence’ concerned with the parallels and cross-fertilisations between legal theorising and musicology, most often depicting judging/lawyering as forms of creative performance. In the second part it is identified that these explorations parallel more doctrinal scholarship on the legal forms – especially copyright – that surround music in the popular space. The third part discerns an area of law and popular music scholarship that emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, formed from traces of textual signifiers in Critical Legal Studies (CLS) scholarship and the expanding of law and literature to a broader enterprise concerned with law and popular culture. The fourth part identifies law and popular music scholarship where music is seen as a challenge to the legal orthodoxy. In this work, there is the utilisation of popular music, particularly songwriters and their lyrics, as manifesting a cultural zeitgeist: the musician as the voice of a generation in protest against a legally embedded orthodoxy. The fifth part considers a trajectory within law and popular music of construing popular music as articulating a ‘popular jurisprudence’. This focus has a connection with the earlier ‘minor jurisprudence’ of legal theory and musicology. It identifies in the cultural project of popular musicians – their lives, lyrics, videos, album art, political and cultural legacies, and social media presences – an articulation, and critique, of received legal forms. Through singing, dancing and creating in the mainstream, fundamental legalities are presented, questioned and reappropriated.

‘Minor Jurisprudence’ of Law and (Mostly Classical) Music

Law and music have a long-intertwined history. First Nations peoples of Australia describe essential legal relations with Country as ‘songlines’: that the proper relations between land, law and peoples are connected though song. In the mythmaking of J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Silmarillion, his world and peoples and the discord they experience are constituted from the singing of ‘Great Music’ by the godhead Eru and angelic-like Ainur. However, the posited and doctrinal focus of the modern Western legal tradition has tended to be deaf to the potential foundational intertwining of law and music. Peter Goodrich has suggested: ‘Just as music has historically paid little attention to writing, law – cold prose, serious social speech – has generally marginalised music.’

Introduction

As we discussed in Chapter 1, this book was prompted by the publication of the Planning White Paper in August 2020 and the ‘radical’ reform it proposed. That White Paper had forewords written by then Prime Minister Boris Johnson and then Secretary of State for Housing, Communities & Local Government Robert Jenrick. To say that the landscape has shifted somewhat since then would be an understatement. The White Paper has now largely been abandoned, with some of its contents included in a new Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill. The department of the UK government responsible for planning has been renamed as the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities. At the time of writing in February 2023, the secretary of state in place at the head of that department is Michael Gove, who, precedent suggests, is unlikely to be in place when you read this, and there have been an astonishing six different planning ministers in the last 12 months. However, most significantly, the UK has had three different prime ministers during this period, with Liz Truss replacing Boris Johnson on 6 September 2022, leading to a record-breaking short period of office before being replaced by Rishi Sunak on 25 October 2022. All of this means that the proposals in the Planning White Paper are of little relevance to the future of planning in England. That does not mean, however, that this book is of no relevance; the opposite, in fact, is true, as its central ‘thesis’ that constant cycles of often ill-conceived central government reform and tinkering have failed to establish consistency and stability around planning seems more salient than ever.

The controversy generated by the Planning White Paper and the consequent loss of a by-election in Chesham and Amersham were arguably the beginning of the end for Boris Johnson’s premiership. While he was ultimately dethroned by his party due to other factors too numerous to detail here, the inability of his government to successfully introduce changes to the planning system illustrates neatly our argument that the ‘failure’ of this book’s title is not that of planning but that of the state within which planning operates, as well as the political party that has led that state for much of the last 50 years.

Introduction

The final revisions to this book were drafted at the end of 2022, a year in which the UK had three different prime ministers, all from the same political party, inhabiting 10 Downing Street within a period of 45 days. In that context, it is almost surreal to remember the atmosphere in the Rose Garden of that premises on 12 May 2010. In a scene later described as ‘sick-inducing’ (Merrick, 2014), new Prime Minister David Cameron and Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg launched their agreed programme for government following the general election. In a very unusual outcome for the UK, that election had led to a coalition government between the Conservative Party of Cameron and Clegg’s Liberal Democrats. While fractures between them appeared quickly, their initial coalition agreement was full of inspirational rhetoric about the ‘common ground’ between the parties:

While the language about the ‘failure’ of ‘big government’ can, perhaps rightly, be seen as part of a continuum with neoliberal anti-state orthodoxy of the previous 30 years, the emphasis on dispersing power through what Cameron (2010) called the ‘Big Society’ is arguably different, ostensibly leaning more in the direction of social liberalism. What is certain is that the Coalition government embarked, through such legislation as the Localism Act 2011, on a programme of changes to governance, including planning, which had the potential to ‘disperse power more widely’ and certainly changed the planning system in fundamental ways.

Introduction

This book aims to contribute to reflection on the current state of planning on the island of Britain. More specifically, it brings together a collection of chapters from experts in different fields of planning to provide a review of the past decade or so of reforms of, and debates about, the planning system in England. The initial prompt for the book was the publication in 2020 of a White Paper, Planning for the Future (MHCLG, 2020). This was one of a series of governmental statements of intent and reform proposals for planning that have peppered the period since 2010. Since 2020, both the debate and governmental personnel have moved on. In 2022, the Levelling Up White Paper and the subsequent Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill were published as steps towards the enactment of the planning reform agenda. England has seen the departure of three secretaries of state with responsibility for planning – though one was subsequently reinstated – and the latest rebranding of the ‘home’ ministry for planning, which has changed from the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) to the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (DLUHC). Between the first draft of this book being submitted in August 2022 and its publication, the UK has also had three prime ministers. The reflections in the book and proposals for planning reform have taken place against this background of wider political churn and policy flux. As well as reflecting on planning reform and performance since 2010, the authors have therefore been asked to consider how far the planning proposals in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill differ from those that were floated in the Planning White Paper of 2020, and whether and to what extent, if applied, the proposals in the Levelling-up and Regeneration Bill might result in a change in current planning practices and outcomes.

The title of the book, Planning in a Failing State, uses the different meanings and usages of the term and noun ‘state’ as a means of framing its reflections on ‘the state of planning’ and ‘the state planning is in’. The word ‘state’ can refer to ‘a condition or way of being that exists at a particular time’.