Loose Threads: Cautious Hope for a New Architecture of Advice: Reflections on the Ministry of Places

21/01/2026

The Government is reorganising the place-based policy advisory system, abolishing regional councils, and replacing the Resource Management Act, all within the next eighteen months to two years. This post uses recent Scottish research on placemaking to think through what these reforms might achieve and where they might struggle. Hopefully by the end, you will have a framework for understanding why the gap between policy aspiration and local delivery proves so persistent, and why the pace and simultaneity of the current programme is cause for both hope and caution.

There is something quietly significant about the announcement of the new Ministry of Cities, Environment, Regions and Transport – MCERT for short. Not because the idea is novel: mega-ministries have their own chequered history in this country, but because it forms part of a much larger programme of reform that touches almost every aspect of how we plan and govern our places.

Chris Bishop has articulated the rationale for MCERT in terms familiar to anyone who has spent time in the machinery of government: the current system, he argues, is “too fragmented and uncoordinated” (1News, 2025). Solving our housing crisis is impossible without fundamental planning reform, currently the responsibility of the Ministry for the Environment, and also impossible without reforms to infrastructure funding and financing, currently split across Housing and Urban Development, Internal Affairs and Transport.

Put that way, it sounds almost obvious. Why would one not bring together the policy levers that must, in any sensible analysis, be pulled together, or at least in careful sequence?

I have been reading, with some care, a substantial new study of Scotland’s placemaking policy agenda since devolution. The research, published this month in Progress in Planning, traces twenty-five years of increasingly sophisticated policy aspirations and the stubborn persistence of less-than-great development outcomes on the ground (Richardson et al., 2025).

Scotland operates a plan-led discretionary system, in which planning decisions are made by local authorities in accordance with a statutory development plan (Richardson et al., 2025, Section 3). Over two and a half decades, the Scottish Government has developed what Richardson et al. (2025) describe as “the most embedded approach to placemaking through planning among the UK’s four nations” (Section 6).

But the researchers’ case studies of four private housing developments examined across two contrasting local authorities reveal that the national policy has not straightforwardly translated into local outcomes. The built outcomes remained “fairly typical of volume housebuilder output, albeit with some improvements achieved during the pre-application process” (Section 4.2.3).

The researchers identify what I would term an “implementation gap”: a persistent disjuncture between national policy aspiration and local development outcomes.

But crucially, the barriers they identify are not primarily about fragmentation at the central government level. They are about what happens when policy meets practice at the coalface of local planning and development: limited design capacity within local authorities, the selective interpretation of policy by different actors, and the imperatives of development viability that consistently squeeze out other considerations (Richardson et al., 2025, Section 5).

This initially made me wonder whether the MCERT restructure Mr Bishop proposes addresses the wrong problem. Coherent advice at the centre is valuable, but the Scottish experience suggests that the real barriers lie downstream, in implementation: in local authority capacity and capability, in development practices, in the political economy of local housing delivery. This is the same problem the Land and Water Forum faced: good policy settings detached from delivery.

But here is where Simon Watts’ proposals on local government reform enter the picture.

On 25 November 2025, Mr Watts, with Mr Bishop, announced what they described as “the most significant changes to local government since 1989” (RNZ, 2025a). The proposals would abolish regional councils, replacing elected regional councillors with Combined Territories Boards made up of mayors from each region’s city and district councils.

These Boards would take over regional council functions, including environmental management, public transport planning, and civil defence, and would be required within two years to produce Regional Reorganisation Plans assessing how councils in their region might work together more effectively (1News, 2025b).

The options canvassed for these plans include shared services, council-owned companies, reallocating functions, or merging territorial authorities to form new unitary councils. The plans would be assessed against criteria including support for national priorities such as housing and infrastructure, financial sustainability, and improved service delivery (Scoop, 2025).

Mr Bishop put the rationale plainly: “When citizens vote for their Mayor, they are choosing who they want to lead local representation for the next three years. Most people know their Mayor. Few could name the chair of their Regional Council, or even a regional councillor” (RNZ, 2025a). Mr Watts argued the reforms would “cut duplication, reduce costs, and streamline decision-making” (1News, 2025b).

Read alongside the Scottish research, these local government proposals take on a particular significance.

One of the Scottish study’s key findings was that design outcomes improved where there was strategic alignment between functions within local councils. At one West Dunbartonshire site, a high-level council agreement that prioritised design quality enabled planners to secure meaningful improvements to a developer’s proposals. The researchers found that “the strategic alignment between council functions, particularly planning and economic development… helped to secure the type of changes to the design proposal that WDC struggled to achieve at Garshake Road” (Richardson et al., 2025, Section 4.1.2). The opposite was also true: where different parts of local government pulled in different directions, placemaking aspirations were the first casualty.

The Scottish research also highlights how Scotland’s 32 unitary local authorities “lack fiscal and policy autonomy” and are often characterised as the “delivery arm of central government” rather than equal partners (Richardson et al., 2025, Section 1). The researchers note that local authorities there have experienced sustained funding constraints that have “fallen disproportionately on planning functions compared to other public services… and on urban design in particular” (Section 1.2.3).

If Watts’ reforms genuinely enable better coordination at the regional level, which assumes the Combined Territories Boards can align the priorities of transport, housing, and environmental management in ways that separate regional and territorial authorities currently cannot, then they may in fact address exactly the kind of fragmentation that the Scottish research identifies as corrosive at the local level. The requirement for Regional Reorganisation Plans, assessed against clear criteria including housing and infrastructure delivery, provides at least the architecture for the kind of strategic alignment that made a difference in the Scottish cases.

So we have, in principle, a reasonably comprehensive reform architecture: MCERT addresses fragmentation at the centre; the Combined Territories Boards and Regional Reorganisation Plans address coordination at the regional and local level; and the replacement of the RMA provides the statutory framework within which all of this is meant to operate.

This is, on paper, more comprehensive than anything Scotland has attempted.

And yet.

The Scottish research is unsparing about what structural reform cannot achieve on its own. The researchers conclude that “despite laudable and progressive innovations in national policy for some 25 years, post-devolution Scotland has largely failed to achieve substantive divergence from a wider neoliberal modus operandi of design governance” (Richardson et al., 2025, Section 5). The problem was not that Scotland lacked good policy. The problem is that “policy change, on its own, cannot transform the cultures of practice through which planning actually occurs” (Section 5).

The researchers found that creating well-designed places requires “sustained commitment over the long term” from all stakeholders, and that “design culture and design delivery are mutually reinforcing” (Section 1.2.3, citing Carmona et al., 2023). What this implies is that achieving better outcomes depends not merely on getting the structures right but on allowing time for new practices to become embedded, for relationships to develop, for cultures to shift.

This is where I become cautious.

The Government’s reform programme is proceeding at a considerable pace. Based on my tracking, the Government aims to pass the RMA replacements into law in early 2026. The local government consultation closes on 20 February 2026, with legislation expected to be introduced mid-2026 and passed by mid-2027. MCERT is expected to be fully operational by July 2026, barely six months away. Sir Geoffrey Palmer, reflecting on this programme, reached for Shakespeare: “Let us all hope this is not a case of ‘Vaulting ambition, which o’erleaps itself’” (Palmer, 2025).

There are approximately 1,300 staff across the four ministries being merged into MCERT. Regional councils employ further staff who will be affected by the local government changes. Councils themselves are already, as Local Government New Zealand notes, “not resourced to support the level of growth that everyone knows we need” (Wellington Scoop, 2024) and will be expected to implement a new planning system while simultaneously participating in regional reorganisation processes.

One law firm, surveying the housing reform announcements, observed that “many councils are still in the thick of grappling with the clunky intensification planning processes: the result of the previous Government’s attempt to ‘fix’ the housing supply crisis” and that “it is not surprising there is some scepticism” about whether further reforms will deliver what is intended (Russell McVeagh, 2024).

The question that troubles me is not whether any individual element of this reform programme is sensible. A case can be made for each of them. The question is whether the system can absorb this much change at this pace and still function effectively during the transition.

The Scottish researchers, drawing on the Christie Commission’s 2011 report on public service delivery, note the importance of collaborative approaches to reform and the risks of “top-down, fragmented, and complex service delivery mechanisms” that hinder implementation (Richardson et al., 2025, Section 3.4). They emphasise that successful placemaking outcomes depend on the presence of skilled individuals, what Adams and Tiesdell (2013) call “place promoters” who champion design quality through sustained attention over time (as cited in Richardson et al., 2025, Section 1.2.3). These people are institutional assets. They are precisely what restructuring tends to identify, support and then ensure they are networked.

Palmer’s contrast with the development of the original RMA is instructive here. “The policy was developed back then by the publication of a raft of policy papers and public consultations,” he observed. “It was a policy developed by very open government methods. There has been much less public documentation and consultation concerning the new proposals” (Palmer, 2025).

The Scottish research reaches a similar conclusion by a different route. What would be required for these policies to translate into positive outcomes, the researchers argue, is “a genuine rebalancing of priorities that better upholds placemaking as a ‘public good’” (Richardson et al., 2025, Section 5.3). That rebalancing is fundamentally a cultural shift: in how planners, developers, councils, and communities relate to one another in the places where housing actually gets built. And, the idea of housing as a ‘public good’ is missing from the current discourse.

Also, cultural shifts take time. They require stability, relationship-building, and learning. They are not easily compatible with simultaneous restructuring of central government ministries, regional governance arrangements, and the entire statutory planning framework.

There is, however, a way to think about mitigating these risks. In their 2015 report In the Zone, Eric Crampton and Khyaati Acharya explore how regional variation can function as a form of policy learning. Their key insight, captured in their chapter ‘Failing Fast and Failing Slow’, is that “changing policy in one region, and not in other regions, makes it easier to tell whether the policy has succeeded.” When reforms are staged or sequenced, the system has opportunities to learn and adjust before costs compound.

The Combined Territories Boards and Regional Reorganisation Plans could, in principle, offer exactly this: a mechanism for regions to develop approaches suited to their circumstances, with central government able to observe what works before standardising. Whether this potential is realised depends on whether the reforms are implemented in ways that genuinely allow for variation and learning, or whether the pressure for speed forecloses that possibility.

So, where does this leave me?

Cautiously hopeful, though with the emphasis increasingly on the caution.

The logic of the reform programme is not wrong. Coherent advice at the centre, better coordination at the regional level, a simplified planning and delivery framework: these are reasonable goals. If the Combined Territories Boards work as intended, they may address exactly the kind of local fragmentation that the Scottish research identifies as a barrier to good outcomes. That would be no small thing. Indeed, that would be a win.

But I am wary of the assumption that we can do everything at once. The Scottish experience suggests that twenty-five years of sophisticated policy did not fundamentally change what got built, because the cultures of practice through which planning occurs proved remarkably resilient. The barriers were downstream, and they persisted through multiple rounds of reform. If you follow this substack, then you will know the problems are more often than not, downstream, because far too many of our policy systems are separated from their delivery systems. I like Crampton and Acharya’s suggestion: move with those who are ready, willing and able, learn, then move with the next cluster of those who are ready, willing and able.

These reforms are more comprehensive than Scotland’s. They also ask more of a system that is already stretched. The question is not merely whether the architecture is right, but whether we are allowing time for the architecture to become inhabited: for relationships to form, for good practices to be migrated, and for commitments that actually produce good places to take root.

The Scottish researchers end their analysis with an observation that stays with me: “Truly effective placemaking will require rethinking the roles and responsibilities of Scotland’s placemaking actors so they not only align with, but also deliver upon, the aspirations of national policy” (Richardson et al., 2025, Section 6).

Alignment is one thing. Delivery is another. The distance between them is where reform programmes go to struggle.

Tēnā tātou katoa.

PS: I am still working my way through the details of the local government reforms, reconciling the te reo Māori version with the te reo English version, and trying to distil the implications of Te Tiriti.

References

1News. (2025a, December 16). New ministry to combine housing, transport and environment. https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/12/16/new-ministry-to-combine-housing-transport-and-environment/

1News. (2025b, November 25). Govt plans sweeping changes to how regional councils work. https://www.1news.co.nz/2025/11/25/govt-plans-sweeping-changes-to-how-regional-councils-work/

Crampton, E., & Acharya, K. (2015). In the zone: Creating a toolbox for regional prosperity. The New Zealand Initiative.

Palmer, G. (2025, December 23). The vaulting ambition of Chris Bishop. Newsroom. https://newsroom.co.nz/2025/12/23/geoffrey-palmer-the-vaulting-ambition-of-chris-bishop/

Richardson, R., White, J. T., & James, G. (2025). Placemaking in post-devolution Scotland: The gap between aspiration and implementation. Progress in Planning. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.progress.2025.101031

RNZ. (2025, November 25). No more regional councils—major shake-up of local government announced. https://www.rnz.co.nz/news/political/579978/no-more-regional-councils-major-shake-up-of-local-government-announced

Russell McVeagh. (2024, July). The Government’s ambitious agenda for housing. https://www.russellmcveagh.com/insights-news/the-government-s-ambitious-agenda-for-housing/

Scoop. (2025, November 25). Simpler, more cost-effective local government. https://community.scoop.co.nz/2025/11/simpler-more-cost-effective-local-government/

Wellington Scoop. (2024, July). Chris Bishop announces six changes to boost growth of housing. https://wellington.scoop.co.nz/?p=162108