The 1990s paradigm shift - Transport Policy and Planning in Great Britain - page 117

undertaken by local authorities and lessened the probability of the Secretary of State
intervening to over-ride local intentions. The corollary was that district councils were
required to prepare local plans for the whole of their administrative areas so as to
provide guidance on policies and proposals at the 'site specific' level.
As far as urban regeneration was concerned, the Government of John Major
adopted a more conciliatory approach to the role of local authorities. In part this was
possible because Labour-controlled authorities in the big cities had lost their so-called
'loony left' leaderships of the early 1980s and had abandoned attempts to counter the
effects of Thatcherite policies with their own 'municipal socialism'. In 1991 a 'City
Challenge' initiative was launched in which local authorities were invited to bid for
regeneration funds provided they demonstrated the involvement of the private and
voluntary sectors and the local community.
This introduced an important new dimension into the funding of local authorities
whereby allocation was not necessarily on the basis of 'need'. Rather, individual
authorities were put into a position of overt competition with their peers to mount the
most convincing proposal. This 'challenge' procedure became more widely adopted by
Government later in the decade, not simply as a means of allocating particular pots of
money but as a means of enticing authorities to engage in new types of initiative and
methods of delivery.
More generally the Government's restrictions on local authority funding and
desire for planning authorities to work in partnership with private developers led to
increasing use of so-called 'planning gain' as a means of achieving the provision of
facilities which traditionally would have been funded publicly. These included items
of transport infrastructure and services beyond the development site itself which the
developer would contract to provide or pay for as part of 'section 106' agreements
negotiated as part of the granting of planning permission (14.8).
7.9 Local transport planning
During the 1980s local transport planning had been in the doldrums. The annual TPPs
submitted to Central Government were dominated by major highway schemes even
though the chances of them securing funding approval were slim. The relationship
to 'planning' became tenuous and the TPP documents came to be regarded pre-
eminently as bidding exercises. Increasingly the schemes being proposed lacked any
overall context of the kind that had been provided by the earlier land use/transport
studies. The techniques employed in these studies were still being used to fulfil the
Department of Transport's requirements to demonstrate the economic value of
individual schemes. But these techniques had lost credibility with the public at large
- or at least with pressure groups who knew how to expose their limitations. In any
case the costs of mounting updated versions of the studies were generally regarded as
prohibitive.
As a response to this situation a new style of 'integrated transport study' was
devised (May 1991) which owed much to strategic planning methods employed in
the 1970s. This attempted to overcome the perceived narrowness of conventional
transport modelling exercises by establishing a vision of the overall goals being sought
in an area, the transport objectives consistent with it and a realistic assessment of the
resources likely to be available. Strategies incorporating both land use and transport
were generated and tested for their contribution to resolving identified problems.
The broad scope and short timescale of these studies meant that they did not include