A UCL Laws Current Legal Problems Lecture - 2023-24

Speaker: Dr Edward Mitchell (University of Essex)
Chair: Professor Mike Raco (UCL - The Bartlett)
Welcome: Professor Maria Lee (UCL Laws)

About the lecture

This paper addresses the role of contract in contemporary town planning processes. The paper’s specific focus is on the use, by local planning authorities in England, of contract regimes to secure the delivery of ‘planning obligations’ requiring landowners and developers to provide public facilities and services as part of their property development activities. The starting premise for this paper is that contract has the potential to work in town planning practice to offer administrative efficiency and secure binding commitments from landowners and developers, but that, while contract mechanisms often contribute to the successful performance of planning obligations, there are significant gaps in the existing practice. This paper thus goes inside these contract regimes to think through the possibilities that they enable and the obstacles that they create. The paper does this through case studies of contract regimes created for two recent property development projects. These case studies allow me to show that the contract mechanisms operating in this area often consist of routine, administrative clauses that create an intricate and highly prescriptive framework of rights, responsibilities, duties and powers. However, I also argue that the detail, complexity and apparent rigidity of these contracts belies the one-sided flexibility and the haphazardness of these regimes. Some of the problems with these contract regimes reflect broader concerns about the appropriateness of the use of contract to secure the delivery of vital public services. The paper argues, therefore, that we still need to do more to think through the role contract regimes play in public life.