ABSTRACT
The evidence presented in Part Two describes a practice of negotiating development obligations which had become routine across most local authorities in England by the 1990s. Although the numbers of actual agreements negotiated remains small in relation to the total number of planning decisions made, agreements are frequently used for larger and more complex applications with diverse impacts. Local authorities increasingly recognize their importance in their development plan policies. Even more significant has been the extension in the scope of agreements and the scale of obligations negotiated. There seems little sign of this tendency abating, despite the more difficult development conditions of the 1990s. Packages of obligations often represent sophisticated ‘deals’ covering compensation and mitigation for adverse impacts, co-ordination among different developers, and arrangements for organizing who will pay for what infrastructure. Obligations relate increasingly to positive actions which developers are to undertake, to social and economic impacts as well as infrastructural ones, and to sites at a distance from the development site. Similar tendencies are recorded in the United States (Delafons, 1991a, b; Callies and Grant, 1991; Nicholas et al., 1991; Bailey, 1990; Wakeford, 1990).
