Across the UK and Ireland, housing delivery depends overwhelmingly on private developers operating within market-led planning systems. Local authority planners carry substantial responsibility for housing outcomes, yet they lack direct control over the actors who determine whether homes get built. Working without formal authority over developers, planners pursue housing delivery through influence, negotiation, and steering. They steer developer behaviour, build and sustain political support for contentious decisions, and compete for organisational resources under conditions of persistent constraint. Remarkably little is known about how planners actively address these challenges in practice.

This research, funded by the RTPI Early Career Research Grant, investigates how local authority planners pursue delivery enhancement under these conditions. Three research questions structure the inquiry: What challenges arise in working to enhance housing delivery? How do planners initiate policy responses? How is implementation managed when it depends on private developers?

The study examines two suburban London boroughs, tracking each case from 2017 to the present. Waltham Forest represents incremental, officer-led reform within existing planning structures. Barking and Dagenham represents radical, councillor-led reform involving major restructuring of planning services. The longitudinal design generates contrasting explanatory accounts of the possibilities planners generated under conditions of institutional change and political leadership. The study applies Design Recovery in Cases, an instrumental case study method developed from new mechanistic philosophy and pragmatist thinking, to recover how delivery enhancement worked across these cases and generate transferable understanding of how planners can steer, rather than control, the actors on whom delivery depends.