In 2011, the Coalition Government heralded a new world of ‘Localism' and the ‘Big Society' introducing "a ground- breaking shift in power to councils and communities overturning decades of central government control and starting a new era of people power".

Within this context, planning reforms were to be introduced with the new Government "committed to localism and greater local decision-making in planning". Strategic spatial planning, which had been the backbone of the planning system since the 1960s, was to be abolished with Secretary of State, Eric Pickles, famously declaring that the "flawed top-down targets of regional planning, centrally imposing development upon communities, built nothing but resentment".