Staff from the Department of Urban Studies and Planning have won this year s coveted Excellence in Planning Research Award for their text on Planning Gain. The award is made annually by the Royal Town Planning Institute, the global learned society and professional institute of chartered planners, following peer review of the best of the year s planning research by leading academics and practitioners. The award recognises the high quality and policy relevance of the work on planning obligations led by Emeritus Professor Tony Crook, Professor John Henneberry and Professor Christine Whitehead (at LSE) in collaboration with colleagues in the department, at the University of Cambridge and at the London School of Economics. The work was commissioned by a wide range of organisations, including research councils and charities, government departments, and trade and professional bodies. Practitioners and policy makers helped design the research to secure its policy relevance. The work has led to many research reports, articles in research and professional journals, papers at professional and academic conferences, submissions to government consultations and parliamentary select committees inquiries, and briefings for the policy and practice communities (local and central government and the legal, planning and property professions). The researchers regularly provided independent evidence on how planning obligations worked, critically commenting both on their effectiveness and on the policy changes regularly proposed. All this work was brought together in Planning Gain authored by the award winners and published in 2016. The book tells the story of how planning obligations became an effective means of capturing development value and of securing affordable housing and infrastructure funding from developers, in a way that is accessible both to other researchers and to policy professionals.' The University of Sheffield, press release (9/9/2016)
