The paper addresses the way the UK government has sought to restructure the institutional framework for deciding on major infrastructure projects. This was a response to the difficulties perceived by government and business organisations, in getting consents to major development schemes. This resulted in the creation of a new system under the 2008 Planning Act (since revised, removing one especially controversial element, the creation of an Infrastructure Planning Commission).
The paper examines the early stages of the life of the new regime, focussing on some more controversial cases, to show how the institutional change has affected the behaviour of key actors, and the overall “conflict landscape”. Given that there are relatively few cases to draw on (the new regime only started to deal with cases in any numbers very recently), the paper also draws on ongoing discussion on other projects around which there is significant conflict, particularly that for HS2, the proposed new rail line – which is due to be decided by a distinct institutional mechanism, the “hybrid bill” procedure in Parliament, one traditional way to decide such schemes.
The paper draws on discussions of delegated governance and reorganisation of government structures (such as Flinders 2008, 2010) as well as on planning theorising on the management of environmental conflicts (such as Owens and Cowell 2011). It is early to make any definite statements on the new UK regime (which applies in fact only in full to England). There are signs that concerted action by government reforms can “massage down” levels of conflict in some fields, though this is unlikely to extend to the most controversial projects, where institutional change may just be reshaping the forms and trajectories of conflict, rather than resolving disputes, as had been hoped by the instigators of the reforms.
