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Building the capacity of neighbourhood groups to change statutory planning policy
Research which increased the capacity of neighbourhood groups in England to change statutory planning policy and improve local wellbeing.
The Challenge
Widening participation in statutory planning is a UK government priority and the launch of neighbourhood planning as a new national policy initiative in 2011 was intended to enable local residents to devise plans that would shape the development of the places they lived and improve community wellbeing. Encouraging participation in deprived urban neighbourhoods has always been challenging and the majority of communities taking part in neighbourhood planning were in more affluent rural areas with parish councils.
Across England as a whole, disadvantaged communities have encountered many obstacles in taking part in neighbourhood planning and they have missed out on the many economic, social and environmental benefits
The Approach
To increase participation in deprived urban neighbourhoods Bradley’s team at Leeds Beckett University delivered nine seminars and workshops from November 2015 to November 2017, drawing an attendance of approximately 50 people at each event from 25 for neighbourhood planning groups in Leeds and surrounding areas.
What the research team achieved in these events was to bring neighbourhood planning to life and make it relevant to residents who had little knowledge or concern for planning policy or development allocations.
The workshops and seminars enabled groups from across deprived communities in Leeds to meet and to share experiences in a welcoming environment. They increased the confidence but also the ambition of inner-city groups.
There was so little face to face support available... What you really want is someone to tell you what is useful. They [the workshops] came at just the right time.
The Impact
The impact of this research at Leeds Beckett University has been to increase the capacity of the most disadvantaged neighbourhood groups in England to change statutory planning policy and to make changes to public space that improve wellbeing.
The research resulted in a four-fold increase in the percentage of disadvantaged neighbourhoods in the capacity of disadvantaged neighbourhoods to participate in statutory planning and to author their own development plans.
The neighbourhood plan designed by Holbeck, one of these disadvantaged urban areas, won the National Planning Award and the Royal Town Planning Institute Planning for Excellence Award in 2018 (5.2).
Local residents in the West Yorkshire towns of Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd identified planning solutions to mitigate the effect of catastrophic flooding incidents resulting in a proposal for houses built on stilts and attracting the interest of one of the UK’s most innovative private sector developers.
Community groups in Greater Manchester were successful in reducing by half the amount of Green Belt land allocated for development in statutory plans by the Combined Authority, saving locally-valued environments and ensuring that development was allocated on sites supported by the community.
What happened in some of those workshops and conferences where those groups could actually see what was possible, and see what had been done elsewhere, or indeed some of the mistakes that had been made elsewhere. It oiled the wheels of neighbourhood planning in a big way.
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