ABSTRACT
In addition the proposed abandonment of structure plans and the introduction of district-wide development plans in England and Wales will remove a strategic element in local authority planning which will accentuate piecemeal planning for local housing need. The 1986 consultation paper The Future of Development Plans intimated the death sentence
development in the 1960s with the resultant recognition that planning was not the rational non-partisan business which its proponents had frequently professed (Elliot, Ope cit.). The 400,000 housing units a year promised by the Tories in the 1960s and matched by Labour from 1964 were translated, by inaccessible and insensitive planning machinery, into illconceived, high-rise accommodation, frequently dependent on unproved system-build techniques and located in vast suburban estates far from areas of work, lacking social infrastructure and of a size which defied any regeneration of a sense of community enjoyed by the inhabitants previously located in inner-city slum clearance areas. Such developments exposed the planning apparatus in its then form as being ill-equipped to deal with complex economic and social problems in the cities.
