ABSTRACT
This chapter shows the changes in planning under the coalition and how this era of neoliberal spatial governance firmed up and coalesced from a miasma of uncertainty and a genuine feeling that the recession and financial meltdown might herald the end of neoliberalism. The election of the coalition government in 2010 confirmed the rejection of Labour's ethos of spatial planning with its perceived top-down, target-driven culture. In its place the coalition introduced its own themes, centered on localism and the Big Society, both of which were supposed to turn top-down into bottom-up, thus reinvigorating communities to take ownership and responsibility for planning. The wider backdrop of a rapidly worsening economic situation and a dramatic fall-off in development activity provided yet more influences and inputs into planning policy. Legal challenges to the proposed abolition of regional strategies from a large developer and a concerted backlash against the draft National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) added to this febrile situation.
