‘We need to put what we do in my dad’s language,in pounds,shillings and pence’: Commercialisation and the reshaping of public-sector planning in England

Introduction

Recent decades have demonstrated significant shifts in the roles of planning professionals and the organisation of their labour. In the UK, ¹ nearly 45% are now employed in the private sector, with several local authority planning services wholly outsourced to multidisciplinary corporations (Kenny, 2019a). ² Despite long-standing critique of neoliberalism ³ within academic literature (Beauregard, 1989), planning scholarship has been slow to notice privatisation, or to consider the implications of the profit-motive for a practice traditionally rooted in the public sector (Dear, 1989). This leaves an important set of under-examined intersections, between drives towards more market-driven forms of urban development (Peck et al., 2013; Rogers and Gibson, 2020), organisational and managerial state restructuring (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Peck, 2001) and the reworking of public values (Bozeman, 2007) through the extension of fiscal discipline in local government (Beswick and Penny, 2017). Addressing these here, we seek to illustrate how introducing commercial logics in planning connects to wider debates on neoliberalisation within urban studies as ‘a more deeply rooted and creatively destructive process … that is mutating the landscapes of both urban development and urban governance’ (Peck et al., 2013: 1092).

Recent contributions have begun to address this gap, raising critical questions about the impacts of privatisation on planning’s democratic accountability and (long-contested) claims to operate in the public interest (Parker et al., 2018; Raco, 2018; Rogers and Gibson, 2020). This article furthers these understandings, drawing on ethnographic fieldwork that provided in-depth insight into the changing nature of contemporary practice in England. Our distinctive focus, however, is not on the shifts that occur when formerly public planning functions are undertaken by private actors (Linovski, 2018), nor the ethics and practices of planners working in the private sector (Zanotto, 2019), but on the commercialisation of public planning that has developed in parallel with privatisation.

Whilst planners’ professional altruism (Healey, 1985) has long been critiqued by scholarship that sees professions as fundamentally protectionist and self-interested (Larson, 1977), there has been little direct consideration of how commercial imperatives influence planning work, especially in the public sector where they have traditionally been viewed as a potentially distorting influence on professional judgement (Linovski, 2019; March, 2007). This article therefore addresses two key, previously unexamined questions: How do public-sector planners make sense of the introduction and intensification of commercial imperatives into their work? How are their professional practices and identities changing in response?

Studies of the micro-politics of state restructuring under neoliberal governments have illustrated deep-rooted changes in the cultures of public organisations introduced by new managerial rationalities, typically imported from the private sector to promote a culture of enterprise and challenge purportedly sclerotic bureaucracy (Clarke and Newman, 1997; Cochrane, 2004; Peck, 2001). This work suggests that managerialism can generate complex patterns of accommodation and conflict, generating dilemmas and resistances as public sector workers seek to understand change and reconcile it with pre-existing understandings of their work, potentially exercising street-level agency to shape the implementation of reforms (Clifford, 2012). This article extends existing studies of the ‘cultural work’ through which professionals make sense of political and organisational pressures for change (Inch, 2018), asking how commercial pressures affect (and are affected by) planners working in local authorities.

To do this, the article identifies three discourses critical to commercialisation: a concern for the ‘customers’ of planning; a conceptualisation of planning as a mode of ‘delivery’ within a neoliberal economy; and a narrowly economistic reframing of ‘value’ in planning. Emerging from both our empirical work and recent scholarship, these discourses form an environment that we term the delivery state, which frames contemporary professional practice and planning work. We argue that pressures to commercialise emerge within the delivery state to constitute a new ‘economy of attention’, directing planners’ energy towards income-generating activities in potentially problematic ways. The article begins by setting out our understanding of the three discursive elements that constitute the delivery state, how they shape the logic of commercialisation and its distinctive economy of attention. We then introduce our ethnographic fieldwork, conducted at a local authority currently commercialising its activities. Our conclusions reflect critically on the limitations of commercialising professional planning within the delivery state.

Understanding the logic of commercialisation

Since 2010, disciplinary pressures generated by austerity have acted as a mechanism of commercialisation within English public sector planning. Local authorities saw budgets reduced by 42% between 2009/2010 and 2018 (Kenny, 2019b), and consequently sought new revenue sources, including generating income by charging fees for planning services. Fees rose from 15% in 2012 to 20% in 2018, generating £100 m more in 2017/2018 than in 2009/2010 (Kenny, 2019b). In the short term, fee income preserved jobs and kept statutory services running, but the introduction of commercial logics has deeper roots in longer-term changes to state service provision, defined by moves to charge for public services to generate profit or reduce costs, and also to create new markets (Jones and Comfort, 2019).

In tracing the historical conditions that made commercialisation ‘thinkable’ in this context, our analytical approach borrows from Foucauldian concepts of genealogy as ‘a form of history which can account for the constitution of knowledges, discourses, domains of objects etc’ (Foucault, 1984: 59). We set out to examine how a distinctive logic of commercialisation has emerged within the shifting institutional forms and practices of English planning. As part of this, we identify three key discourses that contribute to the logic’s formation: the first seeks to re-imagine planning as a public ‘service’ around the concept of the ‘customer’. The second casts planning as a mechanism of ‘delivery’, particularly of housing. The third seeks to narrow understandings of value in planning, thereby marginalising wider debates on values that have been at the heart of the discipline. Operating separately and together within the institutional settings of contemporary English planning, these discourses constitute a particular configuration of power-knowledge that we term ‘the delivery state’ and within which, we argue, commercialisation has become an increasingly hegemonic response to austerity, such that not commercialising has become increasingly unthinkable.

Methods

The research presented here forms part of a wider project, Working in the Public Interest? (http://witpi.group.shef.ac.uk/), exploring how planners in both public and private sectors understand and respond to commercial logics. At its core the project has an ethnographic focus, with five in-depth, organisational case studies – two public sector and three private sector, chosen to span and give insight into the range of professional planning practice in England today. A key aim has been understanding how planners navigate changes in the external environment, particularly in the ‘dilemmatic spaces’ of practice (Hoggett, 2006).

Here, we draw predominantly on material gathered from observation and interviews at one local authority, contextualised by the project’s wider work. Bakerdale was initially selected to represent a more ‘traditional’ authority, maintaining a range of in-house experts rather than outsourcing significant parts of the planning function. The reason for focusing on Bakerdale here, however, is because it stands alone – both within the project and within England – as a clear example of pro-active commercialisation. Uniquely, we have witnessed this in process, affording privileged insight into the changes introduced by this new economy of attention. The dataset for Bakerdale includes over 150 pages of fieldnotes and 15 interviews, representing insight from repeated visits over seven months. This level of access enabled rich understanding of how the delivery state’s commercial logics are changing day-to-day public practice, representing a significant and original contribution to current debates. The reflections shared by individual planners in interviews were key to understanding what commercialisation means for planning practice, the planning profession and its future. Where names are given, for either people or places, they are pseudonymous. Not all participants are pseudonymised, however, with some referenced by role. This maintains narrative clarity; key participants having names enriches the narrative, inventing names that appear only once creates confusion.

Bakerdale

Bakerdale is a district authority in southern England. A town of about 100,000 people, Bakerdale lacks the quaint sheen of some of its neighbours. Nevertheless, it is within easy commuting distance of central London, meaning developers are keen to build there. The planning department sees itself as having a long-standing, positive culture, and characterises itself as a trailblazing, modernising planning authority at the forefront of change. Against the backdrop of government proposals to allow ‘alternative providers’ to compete with local planning authorities to process applications for planning permission, ⁵ Bakerdale decided to investigate the potential for commercialisation of its services through a comprehensive exercise called ‘Go-To’. Even though the ‘alternative providers’ initiative was not implemented by national government, Bakerdale remained committed to proving that their services were efficient and cost-effective. A significant driver, in the austerity context, is that ‘Go-To’ aspires to reduce the annual Council subsidy for planning services from £1.5 m to zero, using increased fee income to cross-subsidise policy and enforcement work, an ambition now written into spending plans. ⁶ In pleasing senior managers and the council’s accountants, the planners at Bakerdale hope to be left alone to continue what they see as their good work in the interests of the district. Indeed, Matilda, the Head of Planning, is proud of her team and sees making the space for and safeguarding their work as central to her role. ‘Go-To’ is led by an ex-developer, Simon. His watchword is eliminating uncertainty for everyone, an approach he sees offering opportunities to both generate financial value and demonstrate the value added of professional planning advice.

‘Go-To’ is enabled by the discretionary model of English planning, where development plans are not prescriptive and much planning progresses through the granting or withholding of permissions for particular proposals. This characteristic flexibility lays the foundations for the activity of the development industry but also engenders uncertainty; developers are keen to eliminate this, creating a self-contained market in advice on the acceptability of proposals. As a result, the economy of attention generated by commercialisation focuses particularly on the paid-for provision of pre-application advice to would-be developers. Bakerdale’s pro-active planners also see an opportunity here, however, to engage developers early and push plans in the right directions. But this apparent win-win solution, where professional advice and commercial logics seem to combine, is not without tensions. Not least since, for the most part, locally elected politicians can have the final say on proposals. This means that a ‘yes’ from Bakerdale’s planners is not necessarily a ‘yes’. In effect, ‘Go-To’ is premised on being able to monetise a promise to reduce but not eliminate uncertainty, whilst the future of Bakerdale’s planning service becomes increasingly reliant on extracting financial value from development activity in order to add public value through professionally administered regulation. This complex and contradictory initiative therefore gives rise to a host of other issues and changes that have important implications for planning work, and which we now unpack.

The austerity context and financial logics

Austerity is a key consideration in the changes introduced, bringing financial logics to the heart of planning. A Team Leader notes: ‘The priorit[y] from the council’s perspective is to try and get a department that is self-funding’. Unique to Bakerdale is the comprehensiveness and scope of its ambitions. Commercialisation is not just a concern for senior managers; instead, a wider culture change seeks to instil a commercial mindset. As Simon says: ‘We need to put it in my Dad’s language, in pounds, shillings and pence, what we do’.

Underlying these quotations are understandings of wider contexts and currents to which planners appear to have to reconcile themselves, perhaps even catch up with. The last three or four decades of change in understandings of public service delivery unite with the austerity context to create an imperative against which planners feel powerless. As such, it often seems less that commercialisation has become thinkable than that not commercialising has become increasingly unthinkable.

Despite these disciplinary pressures, planning continues to be seen as important. Simon states: ‘I’m right wing, I’m a capitalist, but with a big heart so I want economic growth, I want development, I want these good things but not at any price’. Thus, planning continues to have a role: managing development processes, mitigating costs and realising net benefits in the wider ‘public interest’. The difficulty is being able to fulfil this role given a national context that is hostile to planning and where resources to support it have been diminished. For ‘Go-To’, the concern becomes identifying the value that planning provides and converting this into monetary equivalence, for the ‘bottom line’ is seen as the argument that might convince senior managers to safeguard planning.

Performance and service

Another key determinant of the success of ‘Go-To’ is providing ‘high quality’ service, particularly in pre-application advice and PPAs. As noted, these are discretionary parts of the system for which local authorities are increasingly keen to charge, not just to recover direct costs but to meet wider funding challenges. On site visits with applicants, planners continue to make their points firmly about issues like design and natural light, illustrating how they see opportunities to influence proposals early on, when they feel developers are relatively open to accommodating suggestions. Under the auspices of ‘Go-To’ and longer-running understandings of a development management approach, they look to be ‘solutions focused’, offering alternatives to unsuitable proposals rather than straightforward refusals. Key to growing these areas of Bakerdale’s offer to reduce uncertainty is the promotion of the trustworthiness of planners and their advice:

We will be able to say in selling our services, ‘Come and talk to one of our officers; if we tell you six units, it’s six units. Don’t go for seven, we’ll refuse you, it’ll go for appeal, the appeal will be overruled. Just take our advice’. (Simon)

One key means that ‘Go-To’ has for managing uncertainty is the familiar setting of time targets for responses. It is perhaps unsurprising that this is conceived in financial terms: ‘Every part of time has to be accounted for in terms of who’s paying for it. What purpose are you doing it for, therefore who pays?’ (Team Leader).

Officers complete timesheets in five-minute intervals, something our private sector participants regarded incredulously. Fundamentally, this allows costing of the service’s every element, justifying charges to clients. Notably, it also creates data for assessing efficiencies alongside disciplinary effects. Some officers reflected on the perverse difficulties that the process had generated, including a significant, arguably inefficient administrative workload: ‘The problem […] really, is finding the time to fit a whole other process into the way you work, whilst carrying on actually doing what you need to be doing’ (DM Officer). We might say that time takes on a different value here in terms of chargeable hours. This generates challenges, particularly on complex applications and around balancing speed with the quality of advice, which could be exacerbated by a mooted two-tier system whereby applicants could pay more for faster service. Despite such challenges, the logic was broadly accepted: ‘It’s effectively offering a fast track and a slow track, but then it’s no different to … we’ve had first-class and second-class stamps for 100 years, haven’t we?’ (Strategic Planning Manager).

Underpinning the transformation inaugurated by ‘Go-To’ is the introduction of a financial logic to planning work. This is seen very much as a cultural shift, whereby planners now work for ‘clients’:

I think generally, we should be more like a consultancy. I find it hard to argue against it really. Ultimately, someone gets planning permission, that’s a private benefit. Why would you pay for that with public money? So, I think we should be billing for everything. (Team Leader)

It is striking that planners do not seem to experience this as a dilemma. Such an approach might be seen as illustrative of how the neoliberalisation of public sector planning has occurred and the extent to which it has taken root, enabled by the peculiarities of the English planning system. Instead of a public consent, planning permission is framed as a private benefit, paid for by the applicant. This shift in understanding is assisted by the fact that the profits arising from planning permissions overwhelmingly accrue to landowners and developers. Even amongst planners who were more wary, the broad logic is accepted; fears centre on whether the service offers ‘value for money’:

I’m slightly uncomfortable with the amount we’re charging, but that’s just because we’re not used to working in a commercial machine. I mean the more you do it the more it makes perfect sense. I can’t imagine we’ll go back. (DM Manager)

Finally, there were hints that such cultural changes might influence planners’ expectations around recompense for working in a new system where value is increasingly calculated and linked to individual performance, generating pressure to introduce incentives and to understand success and good practice in the terms set by a more commercial regime: ‘… if it’s to take root, there will have to be a feedback loop which impacts people’s pay, to encourage the culture’ (DM Officer).

The customer and client

A key dimension of commercial logic is the relation between producer and consumer, or in terms of services, the customer/client and consultant/advisor. As noted, public sector planning has tended not to have a clearly defined ‘client’. In Bakerdale, the applicant was not framed as the sole or core ‘client’, and considerations of wider groups, including communities benefiting from planning decisions, were also deemed important. However, commercial logic requires a defined client who pays for a service. The planners at Bakerdale were acutely aware of this shift and articulated a definition that helped separate the different groups they saw themselves serving:

… clients are anybody who pays for our service and customers are anybody who actually benefits from our service or needs our service who doesn’t pay for it. There will be people who are objectors or making representations on planning applications; we serve all of those too and they won’t pay for that. (DM Officer)

This may be read as one means by which planners sought to conceptually structure their orientation, with clients representing the commercial side of their work, whilst ‘customers’ represented the wider groups they served. This, however, does not aid understanding of what planners do when their clients want different things from their customers. One means of dealing with this was defining their ‘professional’ roles in terms of work to raise the ‘quality’ of development and thus serve the public interest:

It is our job in servicing that client to service the public interest, not Persimmon’s [a major UK housebuilding firm] interest, and to make sure that the way they’ve presented the information is weighing and balancing the things in the public interest. (Matilda, Head of Planning)

The delivery of development

Simultaneously servicing the public interest and their clients by ensuring that developments were of a particular standard and quality led many planners to focus on design issues. Due to high development pressures in southern England, local authorities retain some scope to secure public benefits from developers provided this does not threaten the financial viability of schemes. In other words, planners can add value by insisting on higher quality development, secured as a percentage of development value and developers’ profits. However, the extent of this ambition is always framed by the reactive nature of much of their work. Planners sought to tweak schemes proposed by developers, rather than themselves taking forward radically different forms of development. This speaks to one of the central ironies of the ‘delivery’ culture, the limits of planning’s ability to actually deliver any development. Instead, reflecting discursive changes introduced since the early 2000s, delivery was framed by officers in terms of a positive, ‘solutions focused’ engagement with development:

I think development management is a much better word than development control because it’s not about being part of a state and … you know, the computer says no, go away and leave me alone, what are you doing trying to develop this piece of land? It’s more about, right, there is a common good here, how do we realise that? (Team Leader)

However, it was also recognised that there was always room for improvement, through a deepening of the cultural adjustment to this reality: ‘It’s getting better, but I think local authority planners need to understand more of what the other side [developers] are trying to do and sometimes they lose sight of that’ (Team Leader).

The local authority’s commitment to shaping better development within the terms of the delivery culture entailed seeing the local plan as a key tool. Nevertheless, this too was constrained by wider central government policies that inhibited, for example, too much concentration on enforcing design and sustainability standards:

I’m probably not in the best place about how I feel about my job. A few years ago I thought I’d got there because I wrote a policy that required all new homes to have renewables on them, you know, there was a target for carbon reduction … That was like … yeah, this is one of the reasons I went into planning because this is the kind of thing that I would like to see, this is what we achieved, you know? Then the government got involved and they talked about sustainable homes, that was going to be part of building regulations, and then they chickened out, didn’t happen, and we don’t have that policy anymore. (Senior Policy Planner)

As this planner grapples with the meaning of change, we can see a level of detachment from the work emerge (cf. Zanotto, 2019). This is perhaps genuine resignation or perhaps a way of coping with a shift in focus, from proactively seeking to enact positive courses of action to reactively pushing for less bad outcomes, which is still thought to be better than nothing. This shift is explicitly tied to policy pressures to ‘deliver’ new housing units:

I don’t talk to younger colleagues about that, but I find it quite depressing that we don’t seem to have enough control, and that’s partly because there’s this ‘build, build, build, make maximum efficient use of land!’. Nobody wants a garden, apparently. But you do have the opportunity to … and it will vary, I think, from where you work, the challenges vary. I think Bakerdale is a very good council to work in, has a very positive place-focused, sustainable focus through its leadership, you know, I think it’s a good place to work. You can achieve more of that than maybe you can in other authorities. (Senior Policy Planner)

Questions emerge here around the extent of the professional’s ability to contribute meaningfully to the development of a place. Bakerdale’s specific context – development pressure plus a historically strong planning culture – make their current, albeit diminished contribution possible. This is not replicated everywhere. Not discussing the implications with younger colleagues is understandable in not wanting to unduly dispirit those early in their careers, but it suggests that the space for certain kinds of reflection has diminished in tandem with planning’s influence. This hollowing out has implications for how we might view the profession of planning:

I sometimes wonder, in a purist’s sense, whether planners are professionals or whether actually we’re bureaucrats. Because even if you work in the private sector, you’re still there to operate under the rules. Now, I know an architect also has to operate under the rules but building a building exists; there is no government regulation that creates the activity of building a building. But the whole activity of planning is created by government legislation. So, are we professionals? That’s a good question. Then, that ends up – if you end up having a bad local plan, your professional job is to implement that plan – not to implement that plan badly, but to implement that bad plan. Most people would say it’s not a professional’s job to knowingly do a bad job. But actually, if that’s the plan, that is your job. And that’s why it’s a question as to whether we really are professionals. (Matilda, Head of Planning)

These debates are not new. The Schuster Committee on the qualifications and skills required of public planners argued in 1950 that regulation could be considered largely administrative, requiring less expertise than the more highly valued work of plan-making. This view persisted, even as development control activity became progressively more central to the operation and outcomes of planning processes (Booth, 2003). The ‘Go-To’ programme reflects this centrality, intensified by the economy of attention generated by commercialisation. Matilda’s concerns speak directly to the consequences of the disciplinary matrix generated by regimes of managerial control, intensified by austerity-driven pressures to make ‘delivery’ of development pay. Whilst planning has arguably been sheltered from some of the stronger forms of new public management (e.g. outsourcing, privatisation), long-standing concerns about the deprofessionalisation of public services under managerialism (Ferlie et al., 1996) may need to be revisited as long-running processes of state restructuring continue to play out.

Discussion

This article offers deep insight into current public sector planning practice in England. In particular, it significantly advances understanding of how commercial logics now penetrate day-to-day planning work, and more importantly how they are framed and understood. Although uneven in its adoption, we have argued that commercialisation represents an important and as yet unexplored dimension of what Ferm and Raco (2020) call the ‘market-led viability planning’ emerging under late neoliberalism. The commercialisation of previously publicly funded planning functions deepens state reliance on mechanisms for capturing development value, from questions of urban policy and development (e.g. funding the provision of infrastructure) to the organisation and funding of public planning services.

By positioning commercialisation as a distinctive extension of the longer run emergence of the ‘delivery state’, we have shown the particular contemporary configuration of these trends in England, but they also have wider resonance. The casting of planning as a barrier to economic growth and its consequent reimagination as a means of enabling development have been widely felt in numerous locations (Linovski, 2017; Taşan-Kok and Van Den Hurk, 2019; Zanotto, 2019). The delivery state emerges from the confluence of neoliberal and managerial pressures to limit the scope of public sector planning, producing technically circumscribed and depoliticised forms of planning, suspicious of practices which cannot be valued through performance management regimes (Raco and Savini, 2019). Whilst the managerial shift to service delivery, with its concomitant focus on the ‘customer’, has been used to understand local government planning, our account of the delivery state in Bakerdale takes this further. In particular, it illustrates how austerity has combined with the roll-out of market-led viability planning (Beswick and Penny, 2017; Ferm and Raco, 2020) since 2010 to intensify organisational discipline. ‘Delivery’ thus becomes imagined not only as a commitment to customers or clients, but also as a broader reimagining of planning as enabling the delivery of development. As such, we have shown how the forms of value inherent in planning work have been shifted. In Bakerdale, not only has this made commercialisation possible, but it has made not commercialising increasingly unthinkable as the planning service becomes reliant on generating income by charging applicants for services. The existential threat that austerity poses to public sector planning and the livelihoods of individual planners extends the delivery state’s power, creating a powerful disciplinary matrix around the logic of commercialisation.

Whilst accounts of contemporary planning have explored the neoliberal repositioning of planning, few have engaged deeply with the impacts of these shifts on planning’s micro-practices. The ethnographic method affords deep insight into how planners’ daily work is affected by commercial agendas. We have illustrated this by tracking how Bakerdale’s ‘Go-To’ programme, an explicit attempt to re-value a planning service in ‘pounds, shillings and pence’, creates a new ‘economy of attention’, leading to the valuing of those aspects of planning work that can be charged for at the expense of other important tasks, which increasingly require ‘cross-subsidy’. We show how this economy of attention entails a series of attendant changes in the relations, practices and professional identities that constitute public sector planning. Planners are now required to focus on fee-paying clients, through technologies such as charging schedules, accounting for client-focused work through timesheets and avoiding non-chargeable work.

Commercialisation’s distinctive economy of attention further entrenches the delivery state’s technocratic hollowing out of the ‘content’ of professional work. Commercial logics involve a shift to meeting client needs, at the expense of other ‘customers’ or standing up for particular sets of values. Whilst planners still need diverse skills and competencies, and continue to argue their work makes a difference, planning’s historically substantive purposes have largely fallen away from discussion. Professionalism becomes defined as the knowledge required to navigate the statutory planning system, framed by a set of comportments and practices (e.g. timeliness, trustworthiness, standard wording of advice). There is less evidence of commitment to distinctive professional values or any intellectual project focused around the purposes of planning and the substantive outcomes that planners pursue. Meanwhile, planning authorities and planners move into competition with one another, to attract and process the development on which their survival relies, perversely contradicting planning’s self-understanding of offering a holistic and strategic perspective.

The new economy of attention generated by the logic of commercialisation arguably offers a privileged level of insight into the ultimate consequences of the delivery state. Professional planning values and the public interest are present only when development value allows. Reconfiguration of planners’‘acting space’ (Grange, 2013) around those parts of the planning process capable of generating revenue thus exacerbates planners’ already limited ability to exercise situated judgements.

In reconfiguring professional work, the delivery state recasts the value realised through planning work; potently symbolised in the description above of planning permission bestowing a private benefit rather than serving a wider public interest. Whilst ideals of ‘delivery’ offer convenient ways for planners to show that they are ‘performing’ and making a difference, their narrowed acting space allows them to do little more than tweak development according to a series of rules. Even though planning lacks the ability to deliver on its own account, measuring performance against time or quantity targets creates a significant disciplinary mechanism ensuring that planners (and local authorities) focus on the process, rather than the cumulative outcome of development. In the delivery state, then, planning’s scope shrinks to a focus on the details of market-driven change, where planners endeavour to add ‘public value’ around the margin of schemes (Vigar et al., 2014). The overarching concern is with how much development is delivered, not its quality or how it meets long-term needs.

We have also stressed the importance of exploring the forms of cultural work through which Bakerdale’s planners adapt to commercialisation’s distinctive economy of attention. Notwithstanding minor concerns, broad acceptance of the changes introduced by ‘Go-To’ was striking, with little or no evidence of ‘cultural war’ between professional and managerial modes of control (Cochrane, 2004), nor of micro-level resistance (Clifford, 2012). Rather than a potentially distorting influence, commercialisation was normalised as a necessary extension of widely accepted logics, its frustrations a price worth paying for continued political and senior managerial support for planning. The article, then, updates accounts of planners’ agency in confronting governmental reform agendas and managerialism (Clifford, 2012; Grange, 2013), suggesting increasing professional accommodation to the realities of the delivery state.

Conclusion

Bakerdale’s planners do their best to cope with commercialisation in unenviable circumstances. The context in which they operate, however, seems far removed from the normative promises of much theory, let alone the forms of planning required to respond meaningfully to the major crises society faces as climate change and inequality deepen, and access to affordable housing dwindles further. Bakerdale may represent just one case, but its specificities are also important. Elsewhere in England, where development pressure and fee income are lower, the notion of a cost-neutral planning service may generate different challenges (Kenny, 2019b suggests considerable variation across regions). Even in Bakerdale’s relatively favourable circumstances, the prospect of realising a cost-neutral service remains vulnerable to economic downturn. Private sector complaints about charges being levied by a monopoly provider may also increase, and without clear arguments around the value inherent in a distinctively public planning they look harder to refute.

Rather than waiting for commercialisation to buckle under its own contradictions, however, it is clear any greater ambition for the future of professional planning in England will rely on challenging the delivery state’s hegemony, which produces the distinctive, narrow forms of market-orientated planning that commercialisation has emerged from. Alongside further work to understand the delivery state and the realities of working within it, we can therefore identify a pressing need for debate about the purposes of planning, proactively remaking the case for the public values it should serve and the public investment required to resource it. A key implication of our work is that the search for alternatives is unlikely to emerge from professional planners; the desire to resist the delivery state seems limited in practice. Though still committed to doing a good job, the horizons of professional practice in England seem increasingly circumscribed by the commercial logics of the delivery state.