Land value capture has become an important mechanism for funding infrastructure and public goods by harnessing increases in land value generated through planning decisions. Among the most widely used forms in the United Kingdom are negotiated Developer Contributions (DCs), yet their adoption and operation remain uneven across jurisdictions. This paper examines the emergence and implementation of DCs in Northern Ireland following the 2015 reform of local government, which transferred planning powers to local authorities for the first time and created new opportunities for this use.

Drawing on a mixed-methods research design combining policy analysis, questionnaires, and semi-structured interviews, the study provides the first comprehensive assessment of the development of DCs in Northern Ireland. It investigates both the practical operation of the mechanism and the perspectives of public, private, and civil society stakeholders regarding its purpose and future role within the planning system.

The findings reveal significant tensions and competing narratives surrounding the function of DCs. While some stakeholders frame them principally as a regulatory tool to mitigate development impacts and ensure development acceptability, others advocate a more expansive role, positioning DCs as a mechanism for capturing development value to deliver wider public benefits and support strategic planning objectives. The Northern Ireland case demonstrates how an emerging planning culture can create conditions for contestation, shaping power relations and reinforcing ambiguity regarding the role of DCs. The study contributes to wider debates on land value capture, governance, and planning reform by highlighting the challenges of embedding new policy instruments within evolving institutional contexts.

Planning scholarship is beginning to recognise the importance of time and temporality in spatial governance debates, with Parker and Dobson (2025) underlining the prescience of “uchronia" or the concept of ideal time in the determination of local plans and planning applications. This paper applies this concept to the urban governance approach of Birmingham, a city with a long track record in the planning and execution of large-scale regeneration projects. It focuses on the hosting of the 2022 Commonwealth Games which were seen by policy makers as a catalyst for achieving some long-established ambitions for revitalisation of the Perry Barr district in the north-west of the city. The paper argues that the tight timescale of delivery and urgency of associated planning processes led to a temporal speeding up before the Games to expedite the essential works for the hosting of the two week event itself. But a corresponding lack or urgency post-Games created challenges for the fulfilment of wider legacy in the Perry Barr district where policy ambitions not accompanied by institutional structures, resourcing and processes needed to realise more lasting regeneration benefits. The paper concludes by reflecting more boradly on the importance of time to entrepreneurial modes of urban governance as an area that has been underresearched.

Planning inevitably involves the activity of making and using plans. Planning is nevertheless often criticised in this core function of making plans and using them to guide action and decision-making. Criticisms include making plans that are overly complex or incapable of implementation. Additional criticisms include the challenge of preparing plans within appropriate timescales and keeping them relevant and up-to-date. These and other criticisms call for a contemporary exploration of the continuing role of plans in planning systems.

This paper provides a conceptual and practical exploration of the contemporary role, relevance and nature of plans using the British planning systems as context. The conceptual dimension examines critical questions around the purpose, type and currency of plans in a contemporary planning context – are plans still relevant and, if so, what type of plans? What do plans ‘do’ in the contemporary era? What might be practical alternatives to the traditional types of plans that planners produce? The practical exploration is grounded in the British planning systems that are characterised by significant decision-maker discretion yet are defined as ‘plan-led’. Changing legal and policy presumptions have impacted on the practical status of plans – and continuing challenges in keeping plans up-to-date alongside national policy imperatives have arguably diminished the role of plans in decision-making. The paper concludes with a critical review of whether the ‘plan-led’ system is increasingly a ‘plan-less’ one.