About nine months ago I kicked off a discussion on the LinkedIn Neighbourhood Planning group (I wholeheartedly recommend this group as a range of different views are represented) to see what people thought that would prompt a community to come together and start work on a neighbourhood plan.
At the time I thought the primary driver would be the development potential in a local area, ie. a site or sites where it was pretty obvious there was an opportunity for development in the next few years – people would obviously be for it, against it or simply not care at all. Of course, the reality of people’s different perspectives was a lot more complex but you can read about that amongst a host of discussions on the LinkedIn group. Certainly not many contributors seem to agree with the Government’s pro-development intentions for neighbourhood plans!
Anyway, rolling forward to November last year and I discovered that my local area had successfully secured ‘front runner’ funding from CLG. I was surprised as I live in surburban NE London and I didn’t think there was much development potential left in my area after Tesco snarfed up some run down employment land for a super store and housing development. A neighbourhood plan would have been pretty useful in 2005 to inform the decision on that application and the s106 negotiation but it wasn’t to be. Suffice to say, many residents were against the development and the community mobilised pretty well at that time, which gave me high hopes for the level of community involvement in developing a neighbourhood plan.
After attending my first neighbourhood forum meeting and thinking a bit more about the neighbourhood planning debate my perspective has shifted a bit. As in any area, there are things where I live that could be improved: some are more critical than others depending on personal perspectives. For example, residents are rightly concerned about the area’s declining retail offer, reductions to the library’s opening hours, traffic speed on the local roads and much more.
But not all problems experienced in a local area can be tackled through a neighbourhood plan or the planning system and this is where I think the wider debate has got muddied somewhat. In some discussions I’ve been involved in the resident community has identified a legitimate problem: lack of community spirit, dog-fouling, graffiti and the like – these kind of problems are getting wrapped up in the Localism and neighbourhood planning debate. It’s right that they’re part of the Localism debate and especially the neighbourhood debate but probably not the neighbourhood planning debate.
What a lot of people seem to be talking about is community planning, which I see as different: it operates at a higher level and will include a consideration of issues beyond land use. The world of statutory planning can help here but is only part of a set of solutions, most likely there’s also a need to redesign service delivery or help individuals with specific problems. Neighbourhood planning, or at least the statutory neighbourhood development plans everyone is talking about, is quite clearly a subset of community planning. A neighbourhood development plan is one tool in the community toolbox and like any tool it’s perfect for some challenges, can help with others and completely inappropriate for some.
At the end of the day, a community that is trying to tackle local problems, make the most of opportunities or guard against a threats will want to utilise the best tools available to them. I was able to test some of these thoughts at the Action for Market Towns symposium on Neighbourhood Planning last year, which Renaisi co-sponsored. It was great to speak to people from communities all over the country who were either in the early stages of producing a neighbourhood plan or thinking about doing one. These chats pretty much confirmed my suspicions in that many were just a bit confused about what a neighbourhood plan would do that would be different to their current community plan and most folk I spoke to had just gone through this process in their parish. Since then I’m not really sure that the debate has evolved as I hoped it would and I’ve been too busy trying to get work on my area’s neighbourhood plan of the ground to track it as closely as I did last year. However, my experience of speaking to people in my community is that they want to know what it will achieve and whilst I’ve read reams on the topic, have worked on a number of statutory planning documents and am used to providing such explanation through my work this remains surprisingly tough to answer.
One thing I will say though is that I’d be surprised if more than half of current frontrunners that are supposedly piloting the production of neighbourhood development plans end up actually producing one. As we’re discovering in Highams Park the effort required to do the work is daunting even with the various bits and bobs of support offered and the local authority is struggling with the basics of getting some of that frontrunner money to us so we can hold our launch event. If only we were a Parish but having read up on it the odds are well stacked against urban areas becoming one.
My conclusion is that it’s important to use the right tools for the right job and I’m not sure the plethora of documents and guides being produced around the community and neighbourhood planning debate are getting to grips with the sometimes complex and quite often changing delivery landscape. For those communities just starting out on this adventure I’d suggest a need for some kind of diagnostic that helps people think about whether they actually need a community plan or neighbourhood plan in the first place. It might actually be the case that the opportunities or problems facing an area can be addressed through an existing plan or service delivery structure; most likely it will be the local authority’s.
I don’t see this diagnostic as particularly complicated, just a way of helping those involved understand what they want to achieve then consider the realities of what would need to be done to achieve those aspirations. The way I see it this could save a lot of people a lot of time and effort running up blind alleys and wasting precious time that could be better spent utilising the right tool for the right job in their area.
