Enforcement: A Practical Guide for Planners

On 20 June 1991, Harry Collinson went to work. He was a principal planning officer in County Durham. He had a demolition to carry out. He did not come home the same way he arrived.

That story opens this book — because planning enforcement is the part of the system that can go wrong in ways that no policy document prepares you for. It is also the part of the system that matters most to ordinary people. The neighbour whose light has been blocked. The village that watched a barn become a house and waited two years for someone to act. The farmer who received a notice and genuinely did not know what he had done wrong.

This is a practitioner's guide written by a chartered town planner with forty years of development management experience — someone who has stood on difficult sites, sat in difficult meetings, and on one occasion been informed by a large, disagreeable man that he was about to be thumped.

It covers every stage of the enforcement process: the discretion to act, what constitutes a breach, immunity and time limits, investigation and evidence, planning contravention notices, negotiation, enforcement notices, stop notices, the appeal process, listed buildings, injunctions, prosecution, human rights and proportionality, and managing a caseload in the real world.

But it is not a legal textbook. The legislation is available on GOV.UK. The RTPI handbook sets out the statutory framework. This book is the thing that sits alongside those sources and tells you how to use them — how to exercise the judgment the law requires, how to read a difficult site before you get out of the car, and when to push hard and when to walk away.

That is, in forty years of experience, the harder part.

Who this book is for:

• Newly qualified planners and enforcement officers handed a caseload and very little else
• Development management planners drawn into enforcement work
• Experienced officers who have been doing this on instinct for twenty years and would like confirmation the instinct was right
• Planning managers who need their teams to produce defensible, proportionate decisions

Covers the Town and Country Planning Act 1990, the Levelling-up and Regeneration Act 2023, appeal and court case lessons, and the human realities of enforcement practice that no statute can legislate for.

Instant download. No returns policy needed — you will use this.