In this chapter we look at the decline of planning in England and set out the key reform measures introduced since 2015. The process of the decline of planning in England did not start in 2015 or in 2010, and the reasons why it came about are complicated. We recognise that the current government is not solely responsible for extinguishing the utopian values that once underpinned the town planning movement. One cannot honestly say, that for a generation, planning has always upheld beauty in design or social inclusion. Planning has not always secured the most basic infrastructure provision, such as enough school places or capacity on our overcrowded road and rail networks. However, planning did intervene to secure mixed-use developments and, through planning obligations, it helped secure a proportion of social and genuinely affordable homes. It has also continued to make a real contribution to the nation by, for example, protecting some of our most important landscapes, but these tend to be legacy issues resulting from designations, such as National Parks, made 70 years ago. Although there was a brief period of resurgence around spatial planning and sustainable development in the 2000s, it was very short lived. Strategic planning in England, for example, lasted from 2005 until 2010, which now looks like the blink of an eye.

Since 1970, when the last post-war New Town was designated, planning has been unable to deliver high-quality, large-scale new communities based on the garden city principles. Above all, town planning is no longer an active movement for visionary and holistic place-making, which was its core inspiration and primary function.

At its worst, planning now creates bolt-on housing estates without social facilities and infrastructure provision, little or no public green space or private gardens, homes with tiny rooms on the inside and that on the outside reflect repetitive design, with no thought for local distinctiveness. When compared to the housing that the industrial philanthropists built, the model villages at Bournville and Saltaire, the garden cities at Letchworth and Welwyn, or even interwar council housing, we have gone backwards in the most spectacular manner. So, while we can be certain about how far we have fallen, it remains to try to understand why this happened and why the public and the built-environment professions didn't speak up in defence of the value of planning to society, the environment and the economy.