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The British planning system has come under strain in recent years with the combination of large-scale urban restructuring and heightened environmental awareness. This article considers the underlying conflicts of social values and interests which are suppressed by planning and its `public interest' ideology. A study of public inquiries is presented, drawing on the recent inquiry into the Belfast Urban Area Plan, to illustrate how public inquiry discourse reflects a system of public administration which is strong in powers but weak in social policy. The implications of this for both the legitimacy and role of planning are discussed.

With reference to Britain, Sweden, and Northern Ireland.

The residential arrangements of ethnic groups became the subject of political interest when they were identified as a feature of urban areas that experienced unrest in 2001. Residential segregation was framed as both problematic for community relations and a cause of economic inequalities (Cantle, 2001; Denham, 2001). This article presents evidence that ethnic residential segregation in England was not increasing between 1991 and 2001 and that there was a trend for local authority areas to become more similar at a relatively low level of segregation. At neighbourhood level there is little evidence to regard ethnic residential segregation as a problem despite the policy priority it came to have.

This article shows how Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA) can be used to understand what works to address complex policy problems at a local level, using the example of tackling high rates of teenage conceptions in England's most deprived local authority areas. QCA is a promising method for providing evidence in situations where interventions interact with contexts, enabling causal pathways to be discerned from how sets of conditions combine with particular outcomes: in this instance, whether inequalities in conception rates do or do not narrow, compared with the England average. A wide range of survey and secondary data, sourced in collaboration with practitioners, was explored to identify conditions that might show a relationship with the outcome. Applying QCA's process of logical reduction enabled identification of sets of cases. Two narrowing sets and three not-narrowing sets are presented, showing how there are different pathways to narrowing and not-narrowing outcomes, and how conditions often combine to have causal effect. Although based on systematic cross-case comparison, the article also demonstrates the importance of judgement and interpretation in QCA.