From raised voices to voices raised: putting people at the heart of planning

“Streamlining the planning process is a bit like trying to streamline democracy…”

This line from Labour backbench MP Paul Truswell, spoken in a late night Commons debate almost 20 years ago, has a certain ring doesn’t it? As someone interested in the relationship between the built environment, democracy and citizenship, this pithy one-liner manages to encapsulate so much about the complex nature of that relationship and the powerful dynamics animating it.

The debate itself had been called by Truswell in the wake of the publication of Kate Barker’s interim Review of Land Use Planning in 2006. Truswell was deeply concerned that it signalled a reduction in opportunities for communities to voice their opinions on local development. To him, it indicated “that the Government believes that participation has gone too far, when precisely the opposite is true”. 

Reading over the Hansard record of the debate really brought home the endurance of that framing of public involvement in the planning system – that the public is always seen to be in battle with ‘the system’, engaged in a zero-sum tug-of-war for influence. Depending on where you’re standing, they are seen as having either far too much or far too little power. There’s never been an agreement that it’s ‘just the right amount’. In this blog I argue for a radical rethink of the relationship between citizens and their built environment and a democratic upgrade of the planning system that is fit for the challenges of our times. 

The current planning system is wired for conflict. Being oppositional is inherent to the structure of our planning system. Communities are in the position of responding to other people’s ideas and other people’s plans for the place they live in. The vast majority of people who do engage with the planning system to voice their opinions on new developments are lodging a complaint. Recent Demos polling for our report, The MIMBY Majority, found that only 3% of the public in England have ever submitted a consultation response in support of a new development, while twice as many – 6% – have submitted a response in opposition. 

It is perhaps not surprising that this is the characterisation of the public the current government has accepted and which has informed their thinking on planning reform. When they set out the only options as being either a ‘builder’ or a ‘blocker’, it’s clear where the public have been lumped. So, the logic goes, removing their voice from the planning system is the key to speeding things up. The imperative becomes, as Truswell put it, to ‘streamline democracy’. This has happened with the Planning & Infrastructure Bill, which makes no new provisions for public participation in the development of the new Spatial Development Strategies (SDSs) nor does it require strategic authorities to involve the public in the plan making process. It also acts to curb the power of Planning Committees. The hope seems to be that focussing solely on delivery the argument will be won. 

There are several significant miscalculations in the government’s strategy. 

Firstly, in a world of builders and blockers, where exactly are the MIMBYs? These are the ‘Maybe In My Back Yards’ that Demos polling has shown make up a whopping 67% of the UK population. They will happily accept new development and housing given the right circumstances. We know they’re out there. We know that they have ideas and opinions. But the system we have created can’t see them. It doesn’t make space for them. The decisions that we make about our built environment are not influenced by them. Perhaps Labour thinks it knows what this group wants and doesn’t need to ask them. But this is not just about getting ‘the right answer’. It’s about bringing people along with you, nurturing trust, building support, changing the political narrative and, ultimately, creating places where people will live out their lives.

There are also electoral risks in Labour’s strategy of dividing the world into builders and blockers and steamrollering the latter. Demos polling also showed that the proportion of people who oppose any development in their area – the NIMBYs for short – may have grown by as much as 31% since last September, from 17.5%11 to 23%. The government should keep an eye on that. Picking a fight with a group of people is more likely to transform their views into stronger, core elements of their identity, than prompt them to roll over and give in. All parties at times choose to weaponise these conflicts. Reform leaflets in the local elections showed a particular hostility towards plans for renewable energy infrastructure, such as solar farms. The Liberal Democrats and Greens are also known to play into the same sentiments in constituencies they are contesting.

Isn’t there a better way to think about community involvement? Does it have to be pitched as an endless and bitter conflict? I’m not naive enough to think we can entirely design away disagreement and emotional strife, but we need to challenge ourselves to ask a different set of questions about how and why we use public participation in planning. For me, the debate should not be stuck on whether the planning system has ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ of the public voice in it. Instead we should be laser focussed on whether we’re achieving quality democratic involvement that builds trust and delivers planning outcomes that are in the public interest. 

The public should be involved, not just because we need a brake on the excesses of developers or ill-thought through local plans, but because involving the public will make things better. The opportunity is to make the future exciting and aspirational. The opportunity is to co-create a shared narrative of change. The opportunity is to make places that will be loved for generations. The opportunity is to enable a new citizenship that is proactive, generative and a source of energy for the political system.

The relationship between the public and the state was largely set in place by the Town and Country Planning Act 1947, which laid the foundations for our modern day planning system. With the nationalisation of the right to develop land, so the participation of citizens in the planning process became centred around: submitting in a planning application, responding to another person’s application, sharing ones views on a Development Plan (the precursor to the Local Plan) and appealing decisions made by the local planning authority. The public were cast in a largely reactive role and their opportunity to respond came fairly late in the development of a plan.

Fast forward to 2025 and public involvement in planning nowadays feels like a world of extremes. As housing need and infrastructure upgrades have become more pressing, so too has local opposition to new development. This polarisation means the planning system has become a heady mix of transactional, bureaucratic mundanity and deep wells of furious anger; pointless tick-box consultation exercises and online death threats. 

One of the core problems with the system is the lack of legitimacy of the public voice, in part because of the polarisation mentioned above. Because it’s such an extremely narrow demographic and such a very small proportion of people who actually do get involved, the idea that local planning authorities are hearing from ‘the public’ is barely defensible. Those who potentially have most to gain from new housing being built – young people, renters, working families, low income households – are notably absent from the conversation. 

Current approaches to informing people and involving the public are simply not effective at reaching the majority of people in a local area. We’ve ended up with this bizarre situation in which we have some community members spending years of their lives running local anti-development campaigns and others who aren’t even aware there’s a new development coming until the trucks start rolling in. Even when people are aware, the processes for getting involved are not accessible to them. A piece of evidence on the topic of public involvement, submitted to the Housing Communities and Local Government Select Committee in 2021, put it as follows: “the systems are complex, and the language and systems seem to be from a bygone age…people with money, education, access, and time can navigate the system making it inequitable”. Our polling showed that just over half the public (52%) have no idea how to respond to a consultation.

The other problem is that it is suffused with distrust. The public are deeply cynical of developers and derisory towards local authorities. Research by Grosvenor found that only 2% trust developers ‘to act in an honest way’ and recent Demos polling showed that 46% of the public do not trust their council to make decisions on new housing in the best interests of residents. New builds are widely perceived to be poorly designed and constructed. The limited affordable housing units on new developments breeds further antipathy. 

Trust is the quality that allows you to get to the point of ‘I’m not happy with that decision, but I can see why it was made and I recognise it was a fair and balanced one’. Without it, you’ll never get past the feeling that you’re the loser and someone else has benefitted at your expense. Resentment and bitterness at the wider political system inevitably follows.. 

There are lots of problems with planning in the UK. This blog here takes just one part of it, but a critical one – the relationship between the planning system and the public. For me, it is another example of where the relationship between the state and the citizen is broken, crippled by distrust and paralysed by polarisation. 

We need to renew and remake the relationship between citizens and the planning system. Ideas to achieve this could include:

• Rebalancing the planning system away from discretionary decision-making, towards a set of clear rules embodied in the Local Plan, that representative public panels in each local area are deeply involved in setting, reviewing and auditing.
• Instituting public panels in local planning authorities around the country to help decide what s106 and CIL payments get spent on in the local area and to hold developers and local planning authorities to account. (The House Builders Federation calculates that there is £8 billion in unspent s106 and CIL money sitting in local authorities).
• Deploying Test & Learn methods to develop new ways for local communities to radically empathise with future generations, newcomers to the area and young people who can’t afford to live where they grew up, as a way to inform bolder and longer term thinking.
• Using the new generation of new towns, due to be announced this summer, as an opportunity to use Test & Learn methods to trial radical forms of citizen engagement, co-design and long-term stewardship in the creation of new places.

The planning system desperately needs to be reorientated away from an oppositional, zero-sum model towards a more collaborative, constructive and creative endeavour. We need to change the terms of the debate. We need to stop having the same old tired argument about ‘streamlining’ planning and removing democratic participation as a way of speeding it up. Instead we need a radical new model of citizenship to harness the positive energy of communities and power us forwards. 

If you are interested in partnering with Demos on research and policy work to build the case for change, or running a public or community participation process, then please get in touch with Lucy Bush, Director of Research & Participation on [email protected]

I will be publishing a second part to this blog, focussing on the relationship between citizens and the built environment itself.