The Barker Review of Land Use Planning

In 1997 Tony Blair set out to make the planning system more amenable to industry, commissioning a report from McKinsey, the US neo-liberal consultancy, and in 2001 installing Stephen Byers as Secretary of State with responsibility for planning. Byers set about his brief of streamlining the planning system by publishing a Green Paper called Planning: Delivering a Fundamental Change, but then got sacked for burying bad news, and Blair was forced to reinstate John Prescott as Secretary of State.

Instead of scrapping the whole process, Prescott stumbled on with it, but got rid of the controversial proposal to take major infrastructure projects out of the planning system; and he re-injected the concept of “sustainability”, which Blair and Byers were keen to weed out. Eventually he steered through the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, which introduces a load of pointless and muddled procedural changes to the planning system, without delivering any of the reforms that the neo-liberals were seeking. Prescott paid for his act of sabotage by media exposure, disgrace and dismissal. 

With Prescott out of the way, but the planning system in a state of chaos, the neo-liberals have now launched...

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