This is a website about how neighbourhood planning can be used in practice to make better places to live and do business in towns and cities. It aims to act as a toolkit with information and links so you can find out about a range of tools which communities – including the local business community – can use to look after and improve the long-term value of places and the wellbeing of people who live and work in them.
On the website, when we talk about neighbourhood planning, we mean the formal process that is set out in the Localism Act 2011. This enables parish councils (which exist mainly in country areas) and neighbourhood forums (which should include representatives of local business) to develop a local land use plan. This plan forms part of the council’s Local Planning Framework – the thing which helps determine whether proposed development can go ahead, or not. This matters to businesses in particular because you:
- have a stake in the place you trade
- may want to develop local land and buildings on your own account
- depend on the way the locality is developed – the roads and transport links, parking, neighbouring shops and businesses, local housing, open space, derelict sites, street furniture and signage and how wider ‘placeshaping’ issues are dealt with.
Having invested your hard work and money in a place, you have an important interest in how it is developed. Neighbourhood planning – the local community making a formal land use plan for the area – is important, but the local council and communities (including the business community) have a wide range of other ways of making better places to live and work. These include:
- community planning approaches – 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.
- working with the council – things the local council can do working with communities, including business, to look after and improve places. These include, for example, Business Improvement Districts which are led by local business.
This website is a toolkit for integrating 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 their neighbourhoods in:
- 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 needs to be integrated with wider community planning approaches and working with the council. This toolkit should help local business and others to use the right tools to make neighbourhoods in towns and cities in England better places. We hope you find it interesting, wherever you live.
Places to start using the toolkit include:
Business Improvement Districts
Influencing Local Public Services
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.
