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Designing Places

The development plan

A development plan sets out the policies and proposals against which planning applications will be assessed. The plan should be a powerful means for promoting development that achieves the local council's agreed objectives and of preventing development likely to frustrate those objectives.

Some aspects of a plan may be controversial. They will have implications for how people live, how the local economy performs, how the environment changes, and how much land and property are worth.

In particular a plan must set out the council's policies on design and the physical form of development. The plan will not go into great detail, but it should explain how its priorities are distinctly different from those of other places. Saying that the council is committed to good design, or that development should respect its context, is not enough. Many local authorities have said just that for years, without significant results.

Development plans should contain a positive and sustainable vision of an area's future priorities based on a thorough understanding of how the area functions, the challenges it is expected to face and community requirements

The plan must set out the council's distinctive vision for how its area will develop. It should summarise its appraisals of the most important features of the area's character and identity.

The plan should also set out key design policies relating to issues that are particularly important locally, and to specific areas and sites where change is expected. It should explain how the planning process should deal with design, such as by specifying where urban design frameworks are needed and in what circumstances a development brief should be prepared.

The plan should specify what degree of detail will be expected in planning and design guidance; in what degree of detail proposals should be presented at different stages in the planning application process; and in what circumstances planning application design statements will be needed, for example, in relation to particular types of development of more than a specified size. It should also specify which areas or sites need guidance with the status of supplementary planning guidance and how guidance should be prepared.

An effective plan will set out concisely the local authority's priorities in relation to design, leaving the detail to be provided in guidance documents.

The aim is to provide a land use framework within which investment & development can take place with confidence

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