In more detail
Neighbourhood statements andpolicies can describe how local people and business want to see the area develop in terms of social, environmental and economic well-being. They can cover what you want and be much broader than the statutory neighbourhood plan, which deals with how local land is used. Unlike a statutory neighbourhood plan, it will not be legally enforceable and will not bind newcomers to the neighbourhood, but it could be even more influential.
Neighbourhood policies might cover things like:
- Keeping local services and facilities open despite reductions in funding
- Community-led initiatives and projects to improve the neighbourhood
- Attracting businesses and enabling business growth
- Helping local businesses to create apprenticeship and employment opportunities
- Getting public services to work better together and avoid duplication
- Setting up a neighbourhood company
- Forming an inter-faith forum to enable different communities to appreciate each other
- Improving the image of the area
- Looking after isolated older people in the neighbourhood
- Steps to reduce vehicle crime
- Enabling ‘social prescribing’ by the local health service
- Attracting charitable funding for local projects
- Road safety
- Getting local schools and youth services to work together better
- Organising local festivals and promoting live music and drama in the neighbourhood
- Care and play facilities for disable youngsters
- Busting local litterers and discouraging dumping
- Helping local food businesses to recycle surplus food
- Promoting local shops and traders by developing a community currency.
The content depends on the opportunities and threats your neighbourhood faces and the strengths your communities, businesses and local agencies bring.
Title and status
You might already have a neighbourhood development plan and it might be called something else. In country areas, it might be called a Parish Plan and be led by a parish council. If you set up a community council in your area, the neighbourhood development plan would be its priority list. If you produced a neighbourhood development plan across a whole city it would do what a thing called a ‘Sustainable Community Strategy’ was supposed to do. These are documents which no longer exist, but which councils used to have to produce to explain how they would meet the brief of improving local economic, social and environmental wellbeing.
Neighbourhood policies and development plans are unlikely to be adopted by the council as a local planning document because it will cover such a wide range of subjects which are not related to local land use. However, in producing a neighbourhood development plan, you will inevitably produce statements about how land should be used. If your plan is a serious, balanced document setting out an achievable set of actions (rather than just a wish list), these statements will form a coherent set of land use policies.
Having made a neighbourhood development plan, you could extract the land use policies and implications from it and present them to the council as a local planning document (which they could adopt as part of the Local Planning Framework). Or, more likely, you could integrate the production of a community-led (non-statutory) neighbourhood development plan and a (statutory) neighbourhood plan: do both at the same time.
| Key Facts:
Voluntary neighbourhood policies, statements and plans do not have statutory power and do not bind organisations and people who do not sign up to them (including, for example newcomer communities or developers moving into the area). They can, hwoever, be written how you want and apply to exactly the issues you want to cover. They can be useful ways of focusing on the common good and cooperative working. It could be that you produce a set of community policies relating to the way the area is served; the way communities can work together etc. as you make, and alongside, a statutory spatial neighbourhood plan. |
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BIRMINGHAM COMMUNITY PLANNING TOOLKIT DEFINITION SHEET This sheet may be reproduced in paper or electromic or any other form but please mention it was made by Chamberlain Forum Limited for Birmingham City Council supported by Department for Communities and Local Government.
| created: 2016-05-06 12:58:07 | by: admin | status: f published |