FOREWORD

This Guide has been prepared by the Planning Officers’ Society with support from the Office of the Deputy Prime Minister, Local Government Association and Royal Town Planning Institute.  It is one of a collection of new documents that cover aspects of the spatial planning system resulting from the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004.  This document deals solely with the policy content of spatial plans.

The Guide is built around four key points that arise from the new spatial planning system:  

• Policy planning is moving from a land-use basis to a spatial basis so that it can better achieve sustainable development and good design.
  
  
• Planners working on spatial plans will be at the centre of their local planning authority’s activities because spatial planning depends upon successful corporate working and a commitment to achieving agreed outputs.
  
  
• Spatial planning places a new emphasis upon early and meaningful engagement with the public and other organisations, high levels of communication, work flow management and harnessing the strategies and funding programmes of partners to help ensure delivery.  
  
  
• Creating understandable and workable spatial plans is an exciting challenge to planners; they have to reconcile the need for a set of wider-ranging and more dynamic spatial policies against requirement for a concise development plan and supplementary planning documents.

To an extent, the practice that lies behind the creation of successful spatial planning policies is not wholly new.  Some existing development plans already work towards sustainable development by showing the links between their policies and other local initiatives so they ‘join-up’ what is planned by key organisations in their area.  Now, the requirements of spatial planning mean that all local planning authorities will produce their new development plans in ways that expressly demonstrate their links with other appropriate strategies.

This Guide has been released as a consultation document.  Therefore, the opinions and the suggestions in this draft are not the views of the Planning Officers’ Society or the other organisations that supported its production.  The Steering Group would welcome your comments on the document’s usefulness and your suggestions for improvements.  A feedback form is attached at the rear of the Guide for return to the Steering Group by 30th September 2004.  The next version of the Guide, taking account of feedback, will be published early in 2005.   

Steve Clark, Chairman of the Planning Officers’ Society Steering Group
August 2004

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