This toolkit is about Neighbourhood Planning – but rather than saying how you do it (other people have already produced excellent guides on this), our contribution – based on our experience, here in Birmingham – is to suggest you look at other tools you might use alongside or even instead of it…
The policies and rules set out by your local council which help them to decide how to deal with development proposals. Neighbourhood plans (led by the community) and local plans (led by the council) form part of the framework alongside other higher level documents.
A Neighbourhood Development Order grants planning permission for a particular type of development in a particular area. It is a community-led and statutory way of encouraging developers to provide the kind of development you want to see at a given site.
If your community organisation wants to develop community land and buildings itself, then a Community Right to Build Order can enable planning permission for it on a particular site…
Local Development Orders enable councils to make it simpler for certain types of development in an area to get planning permission. If you want development fast-tracked in your neighbourhood, working with the council may be a better bet than going for a community-led Neighbourhood Development Order.
The ‘community rights’ in the Localism Act can be exercised by certain designated groups on behalf of the community…
Postcodes, census districts, wards and constituencies – neighbourhoods don’t necessarily follow the units of area that are used by public agencies to collect and present data…
Councils don’t just write plans (or adopt those written by communities) and issue planning permission; they are responsible for enforcing planning decisions…
Planning Law is based on the idea that owning land does not give you complete rights to decide what to do with it because the community (through the local council) has rights too…