Roy Gregory

LOCAL ELECTIONS AND THE ‘RULE OF ANTICIPATED REACTIONS’

‘In popular parlance, influence is recognized to be a form ofpower. But it is very evasive, because most influence operates by changing the conduct of people without any outward appearance of change. Though the element of constraint may be of great weight, it almost always appears to be entirely obscured by manifest consent. . . . . Why should this be so ? Because the person or group which is being influencedanticipates the reactions of him or those who exercise the influence.’ C. J. Friedrich

Conservation, planning and politics: some aspects of the contemporary British scene

The extent of environmental degradation in Britain is largely determined by the aggregative effect of a large number of what are conventionally described as “planning” decisions. But because they serve to allocate the unavoidable societal costs of economic growth, many of these decisions are essentially political in character. Some of the crucial choices are in fact made by developers themselves in both the public and private sectors; in order to restrict the damage inflicted upon amenity as a result of their industrial and other projects, on occasions developers do incur unforced expenditure in excess of what is technically necessary. The effective regulators of resource allocation, however, are Ministers and their advisers, in their adjudicatory role in disputes between developers and the voluntary and statutory guardians of amenity. Ministerial determinations not only settle individual cases; they also condition the thinking and decisions of every other party involved in the planning process. At presen...

Landlords, tenants and complaints: the Housing Association Tenants Ombudsman

A major problem associated with the considerable changes which have taken place in the structure of public administration and the delivery of public services has been to provide effective accountability mechanisms. One very flexible mechanism is the Ombudsman institution which has been adapted in many different states and to deal with many different services. This paper examines how the Ombudsman institution has been adapted to provide an effective complaints-mechanism for social housing. After outlining how the Ombudsman institution has been used in a variety of ways in the United Kingdom, the paper describes how the Housing Association Tenants Ombudsman Service came to be established. It is focused particularly on the issue of independence, a key feature for effective accountability, and incorporates the Governments proposals in the 1996 Housing Bill to put the Service onto a statutory footing.