Planning Summit Agenda

Have the greatest impact on town planning
Andrea Pellegram  

This session will cover recent changes in planning legislation and practice, and provide advice on how to make effective representations on behalf of your communities.  The session will summarise the development process and will briefly touch upon the benefits of neighbourhood planning. 

Delivering a Successful NDP, the Importance of Effective Community Engagement and Avoiding the Pitfalls
Josh Guy, Digital Community Engagement Lead at GoCollaborate, Steve Besford Foster, Director at Plan Support and Imelda Martin, NDP Project Manager, Redruth Town Council

Effective digital engagement with local communities is more crucial than ever to successfully deliver a neighbourhood development plan. Digital reach within communities is increasing year on year and local councils must make it as easy as possible for their communities to make time in their busy, challenging lives to engage with them.

Join us to learn how you can broaden community engagement to reach beyond those that generally always participate, discover why ‘digital community engagement’ should be a vital ingredient of your community engagement strategy and learn to avoid some of the pitfalls experienced by other local councils when preparing their NDP.

Planning for Local Renewables
Dan Stone and Neil Best, Centre for Sustainable Energy (CSE) 

Town and parish councils can have a role in influencing where and how renewable energy generation projects can happen in local communities, whether that is through enabling community energy schemes, or to use planning powers through neighbourhood plans and influencing local plans to include sites for specific projects.

This workshop will introduce approaches to ensure meaningful community participation to put your community at the heart of renewable energy planning in your area. 

Government’s Reforms to the Planning System – What Clerks Need to Know
Andrew Towlerton, SLCC Planning Advisor   

The government is proposing “radical” and “far-reaching” reforms to the planning system in England which will “streamline” and “modernise” it.

In this session we will outline the key aspects of the reforms that will have implications for clerks and the sector in general in England, and how they are likely to work in practice.

Using Neighbourhood Plans to Decarbonise Local Travel Choices and Transport Infrastructure
Caglar Koksal, Research Associate in Spatial Policy and Analysis Laboratory Lecturer in Planning, University of Manchester  

This session presents a novel community toolkit, which provides a practical and accessible route map to help communities to create neighbourhood planning policies and community actions and projects to decarbonise their travel choices and local transport infrastructure. Neighbourhood planning was introduced by the Localism Act 2011 as a development plan to give communities power over the development and growth of their neighbourhood area. Since its introduction, neighbourhood planning has been proved to be very popular: with over 2882 neighbourhood areas designated and more than 1292 plans passed local referenda to become part of statutory development plans for their local area. 

The toolkit provides detailed strategies to adopt sustainable transport policies in neighbourhood plans and good examples. The toolkit’s intended audience are neighbourhood forums and parish and town councils in England who are producing, or planning to produce, a neighbourhood plan, as well as Local Planning Authorities and Local Transport Authorities, who are helping communities in the development of neighbourhood plans within their boundaries. 

This toolkit advocates a community-led, place-based approach to decarbonise local transport. This means that appropriate strategies and plans must come from the community and be tailored to the unique opportunities and challenges of the neighbourhood area. Therefore, this toolkit is designed in such a way to provide generic principles and methods of thinking that underpin a transport decarbonisation strategy, as well as provide recent good examples from adopted neighbourhood plans to demonstrate how generic principles can be applied in real life. Some policies and examples in this toolkit might be more relevant to dense, urban cores, whereas others are more appropriate for small market towns in shire counties. Accepting there isn’t one perfect solution for any area, we listed all relevant policies here together to provoke imagination as well as show what is possible. It is up to neighbourhood forums and parish and town councils to decide to adopt and change policy wording to create the most appropriate strategy to decarbonise local transport in their own areas. 

This toolkit is regularly updated to reflect the changes to the planning system and good practices across England. You can always check the latest version from our website https://www.mui.manchester.ac.uk/spal/research/projects/np-decarbonise-transport