Abstract/Summary

The planning system in England has undergone serial and far-reaching reforms over the past two decades with a number of notable changes reflecting a drive to speed-up planning, rescale it and look towards the neighbourhood as a unit of planning governance. An expression of the serial changes has been the establishment of neighbourhood planning (NP) as a part of the statutory land use planning system and the production of Neighbourhood Development Plans (NDPs). This iteration of local planning has brought its own set of procedural arrangements and regulations. One feature of neighbourhood planning process is the examination of the NDP. For this, an independent examiner is appointed who considers the Plan and whether it passes the required ‘tests’ (see Parker, Salter and Hickman, 2016). Drawing on data collected from the cadre of active NP examiners we reflect on how this stage has been experienced by examiners and places this new set of arrangements into the ongoing consideration of how knowledge and epistemic boundaries are maintained or reconciled as planning in England moves towards a co-production model.