MHCLG Neighbourhood Planning Toolkits

Blink and you’d have missed them but MHCLG published ten ‘new’ guidance notes as neighbourhood planning toolkits between 31 March and mid-May.

We say ‘new’ but the majority of the content has been taken off the now defunct Locality neighbourhood plan support programme website as the programme finally ended the same day. Some of the content, but not all, has been updated to reflect the new ‘basic conditions’ for example. Otherwise the guidance will be recognised by those familiar with that old website. Some rather obvious updates have been missed - the latest article in Planning Resource points out that the social media guidance refers to Twitter (and TweetDeck) advice that is clearly out of date.

It’s a shame that MHCLG didn’t choose to wait a little longer and take the opportunity to carry out a more meaningful update to promote a clear vision for where neighbourhood plans fit into the future of the plan-led system. The new Local Plan process and radical changes to national policy and decision making policies may improve the effectiveness of that system, but we’re still not sure. Some clarity would have been welcomed by all – communities, local planning authorities, plan examiners and land promoters – especially in respect of allocating ‘non-strategic’ land for development.

In the meantime, we’d continue to suggest the guidance is approached with a little caution. Some plan makers have found out the hard way that relying solely on the guidance and sticking to it rigidly can cause problems if they ‘don’t know that they don’t know’. We know, we’ve had to help communities to recover projects broken or stalled when the toolkit advice ran out, with few local planning authorities well-enough resourced or experienced to pick up the pieces.

As a classic example, a particularly misguided piece of advice that remains unaltered discourages using professional help to develop policy options before engaging with the local community. This too often leads to projects giving everyone the impression they’re starting with a ‘blank sheet of paper’ with any number of policy levers to pull to manage change. Ignoring strategic context and failing to think through and engage on plausible scenarios and options builds hopes and expectations that the planning system, let alone neighbourhood plans, could never meet. That creates project difficulties later, when the community is unsure why policy ideas they submitted in good faith have been excluded.

There is plenty of independent, qualified, professional help around to help communities with their plan projects. Research of neighbourhood planning has always highlighted how crucial that help is for all but the most benign of plans and contexts.

So by all means have a read but then file it and get in touch!