This is a website for anyone with interest or responsibility for neighbourhoods in towns and cities to think about how to use neighbourhood planning effectively. It is a toolkit with information and links so you can find out about a range of tools you can use – including neighbourhood planning – to make better places to live.
On the website, when we talk about neighbourhood planning, we mean the statutory process set out in the Localism Act 2011. This enables parish councils (which are mainly in rural areas) and neighbourhood forums (as defined in the Act) to develop spatial plans for their localities. Even before the Localism Act gave communities the right to lead the development of local spatial plans, however, communities and local authorities had a range of tools for improving neighbourhoods. These include:
- community planning – tools the community and the agencies which serves them can use to bring people together to plan ways of improving the way neighbourhoods are served etc
- working with the council – local council responsibilities and powers which can be used to look after and improve urban quality of life.
This website is designed to help you integrate the statutory neighbourhood planning process with wider community planning and working with the council to make better places to live.
In this toolkit, you will see some interviews with people from different communities and local government in Birmingham. They are talking about their experience of neighbourhood planning and forming supplementary planning guidance for the places they live:
- Balsall Heath – an inner city neighbourhood with a mixed community and a proud history of community-led regeneration in the Hall Green district of Birmingham
- Moseley – a suburb known for its pubs, independent shops and vibrant community life also in the Hall Green district of the city
- Jewellery Quarter – an historic area bordering the city centre which is home to thriving industry, shops and a rapidly increasing population of residents
Their experience has been that neighbourhood planning in urban areas needs to be considered alongside wider community planning and other alternatives. Urban communities tend to be more diverse than rural villages and small towns. The issues within them may be more be complex and inter-related with issues in neighbouring areas. There tends to be a much higher density of public service delivery in urban neighbourhoods. Community cohesion is often more of an issue. These things mean that the range of what people want to address through planning is often much wider in neighbourhood areas. Residents want to talk about the ways the neighbourhood is served and about the relationships between different communities that share the same place. Many of the objectives and means of improvement are either unconnected or only tangentially connected to land use and development of the physical environment. All of which – taken together with the experience of the communities in Birmingham we have interviewed – suggests that using neighbourhood planning effectively depends on seeing and using it alongside other approaches.
With this in mind, we hope that the toolkit will be particularly useful to people with an interest in and responsibility for neighbourhoods in towns and cities. We hope you find it interesting, however, wherever you live and work.
Some places to start exploring the toolkit are looking into working with
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This toolkit has been written mainly by Paul Slatter of Chamberlain Forum – an independent and non-profit organisation based in Birmingham which helps communities and the people who serve them work together to make better places to live. He was helped in particular by Tony Thapar, John Dring and Fiona Adams of Moseley Community Development Trust; Abdullah Rehman and Dr Dick Atkinson of Balsall Heath Forum and Joe Holyoak who worked with them; Matthew Bott and Nicola Fleet-Milne of the Jewellery Quarter Neighbourhood Planning Forum; Neil Vyse and Karen Cheney of Birmingham City Council; Councillors Tony Kennedy and Claire Spencer of Birmingham City Council; and Meena Bharadwa of Locality.
