Discretion, flexibility, and certainty in British planning: Emerging ideological conflicts and inherent political tensions

In Britain, as the nature of the stare's involvement in the spatial plannin g process changed to reflect political concerns (such as the need for emplo yment-generating development or concern for the environment), so have the m ethods employed by the government to secure consistency, certainty, and con tinuity in policy execution. A desire to create more certain conditions for developers, the public, and investors through greater use of plans has bot h decreased discretionary decision making and shifted it from some parts of the spatial planning process to others. Since certainty has formed the und erlying tenet to statutory changes to the planning system after 1990 and ha s found policy expression through national planning guidance, British plann ing could now be at the juncture of an unhappy ideological conflict between the discretionary nature of British planning and the more certain, less pr agmatic forms of spatial planning. In this paper, I suggest that the changi ng political context of planning in the 1980s and 1990s has led to an ideol ogical conflict in the operation of spatial planning, which involves issues related to administrative law, professionalism, and flexibility and certai nty.