Getting involved in plan-making: Participation in neighbourhood planning in England

Neighbourhood planning, introduced through the Localism Act 2011, was intended to provide communities in England with new opportunities to plan and manage development. All communities were presented as being readily able to participate in this new regime with Ministers declaring it perfectly conceived to encourage greater involvement from a wider range of people. Set against such claims, while addressing significant gaps in the evidence, this paper provides a critical review of participation in neighbourhood planning, supported by original empirical evidence drawn from case study research. It does so at an interesting time as the community, and/or neighbourhood, appears across political parties as a preferred scalar focus for planning. Challenging Ministers’ assertions, while mirroring past experiments in community planning, participation is found to be modest and partial, concentrated amongst a few, relatively advantaged communities, and relatively advantaged interests within those communities. The paper considers the implications for future planning policy and practice