Growth of an ‘audit society’

Just as the growth of local spatial planning, examined in Chapter Four, has been the major reform for policy planners, so the growth of auditing and targets appears to have been the major reform facing development control planners over the last decade. Michael was quite clear on the impact of targets for his professional life:

This comment was common. At first sight, just as spatial planning apparently increases the role for the professional planner, so the growth of a central government target setting and performance auditing agenda might seem to restrict it, reducing autonomy and discretion. As we saw in Chapter Two, this can be conceptualised as a response to declining trust in public sector professionals to guarantee value for money and secure the ‘public good’ (Swain and Tait, 2007). There is therefore reason to believe planners might respond to such an ‘audit explosion’ (Power, 1999) in a wholly negative way: ‘The processes of organizational change demanded by NPM and its auditing agencies produce varying forms of conflict and resistance’ (Power, 1999, p 97). Through examining the data on how frontline planners responded to New Labour's centrally driven agenda of targets and inspection, this chapter interrogates this diagnosis of simple resistance, before considering the continued currency of efficiency for local government and planning.

In Chapter One, we outlined the growth of the target and inspection regime that this chapter is concerned with, and how, for planners, the most important target across Britain over the last decade has been that measuring the speed of processing applications. There is little specific literature on performance management in planning (Carmona and Sieh, 2005), and few accounts published by frontline planners themselves (Kitchen, 1997). Houghton (1997) suggests this is due to a lack of reflexivity in planning. This is in contrast to other public sector professional domains.