Regulating sustainable development: An enabling model for consistent collaboration between planning and building control services in England

Planning (often termed as development control) and building control have existed as public regulatory services on a national basis in England since the expansion of industrialisation in the 19th Century. Since then, the professions have collectively served the interests of local communities but have primarily worked in a mono-disciplinary context. This disciplinary isolation was compounded when the public building control system was opened up to competition from the private sector in the 1980s. Since the beginning of the 21st Century, building performance standards have become increasingly complex due to the introduction of sustainable development as a major policy objective. As a result, disciplinary boundaries have become blurred, with many stakeholders viewing regulation as a constraint to sustainable development. In light of the modern challenges of regulating the built environment, this thesis aims to develop a model with the capacity to enable consistent collaborative practice between planning and building control services in England. In doing so, it seeks to address problems associated with the disparate array of existing building performance standards, the resulting and widening regulatory skills gap and ultimately, the fragmented nature of the regulatory service delivery framework. In keeping with the problem solving ethos of the research, the design science research methodology was utilised, with research methods drawing upon a mixture of attributes common to consensus development and grounded theory research strategies. Building upon the author’s experiences as a building control manager, the adopted research approach resulted in iterative movements throughout the study between a broad base of existing knowledge and theory, and semi-structured interviews with experts in the field. The findings of the research indicate that the creation of domestic and commercial codes for sustainable development, interdisciplinary undergraduate educational initiatives and performance driven regulatory social enterprise offer the potential to address existing field based problems. In addition, evidence suggests that the model resulting from the study has the capability to move the often conflicting processes of design and regulation towards being conjoined as part of a dynamic unfolding process with sustainable outcomes.