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.

Planning is increasingly used as a tool for delivering or incentivising growth. Yet, there is increasingly an acknowledgement that growth needs to be inclusive and provide environmental and social benefits. The London Plan (2021) has an overarching objective to deliver ‘good growth’. At the same time, since the first London Plan in 2004, the intention has been for the identification of Opportunity Areas (OAs) to be the primary way to deliver growth (of homes and employment). Despite the expansion of the Opportunity Area designations, from 28 in 2004 to 48 in 2021 (Ferm et al, 2022), little attention has been given to measuring, documenting or monitoring growth in these areas or to understanding what the outcomes are and whether ‘good growth’ is being achieved.

In this paper, we examine the localised outcomes of the Opportunity Area policy in three case study areas – chosen to represent significant groupings of OAs established by metropolitan-level analysis. Through a multi-method approach including (a) spatial mapping of new homes, jobs, public spaces and social infrastructure; (b) desktop analysis of social, economic and demographic trends; and (c) qualitative site observations, the paper investigates Opportunity Area outcomes against three Good Growth principles in the London Plan: (1) Building Strong and Inclusive Communities; (2) Delivering the Homes that London Needs; and (3) Growing a Good Economy. We find there is significant diversity in outcomes across the three OAs, challenging the conception of how to deliver Good Growth in different places.

There is a persistent housing crisis in England which is however paired with strong resistance to development, particularly in the greenbelt. Densification seems to be the logical answer, but according to policy think tanks with limited uptake outside city centres. Based on a three-year research project, this paper sheds light on a decade of suburban densification in England looking a detailed spatial data, policy documents and interviews with key actors. The findings of the project show the varied nature of suburban densification, showing that densification is taking place on a larger scale than postulated. It provides insights in the different types of densification looking at processes and outcomes and their respective geographies. The research then looks at the role of planners and the planning system, concluding that densification seems to be happening mostly under the radar. Planning policy for suburban areas is mostly passive, which has implications for the design quality of suburban densification.

The regeneration of brownfield land has been a key concern for planning and regeneration since the 1980s, after post-industrial decline in many countries led to the emergence of brownfield sites – technically described in England as previously developed land.

This proposed paper aims to explore the extent to which the focus of regeneration policy in England has shifted over recent decades, from soft end-use brownfield regeneration contributing to green infrastructure development, to hard end-use regeneration particularly focused on housing development.

To do this, the paper compares national and local policies comparing approaches in the 1990s to current policies. The paper also compares how brownfield registers have changed over the years, and which sites/areas get registered as brownfield sites. This compares the approaches of the early derelict land surveys, the National Land Use Database for Previously Developed Land (NLUD-PDL) and the more recent post-2017 brownfield registers maintained by local authorities.

In doing so, the paper contributes to ongoing academic and policy debates about key spatial development paradigms and strategies. Should planning policy focus on dense compact (re)development, limiting urban expansion while providing space for more housing and employment uses? Or can brownfield regeneration also allow green infrastructure development, while accepting this may mean further urban expansion?