Planning Officers Society Publishes Guide to Writing Policy Content of Spatial LDDs

“Policies for Spatial Plans: A guide to writing the policy content of Local Development Documents”    h as been prepared for local authorities in England by the Planning Officers Society (POS). It is designed to stand alongside the series of ODPM guides to the new spatial planning system that results from the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. This Guide covers the policy content of spatial plans and is built around four key points that arise from the new spatial planning system.

These four key points are:

§          Policy planning has moved to join up with related policies and programmes by local authorities and their partner organisations..

§          Planners working on spatial plans should be at the centre of their local authority’s activities.  

§          Spatial planning places a new emphasis upon early and meaningful engagement with the public and other organisations.

§          Planners 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.

The Planning Officers Society gratefully acknowledges financial support for publication of this Guide from the ODPM, LGA and PAS.  

Steve Clark, Chairman of the POS Spatial Planning Committee said “ The ODPM endorses the structure of Part Two of this Guide, i.e. how spatial plans move from a spatial portrait, to issues, a vision, and then to objectives and policies.   The ODPM also welcomes the examples of policies that that show how links can be made to related policies and programmes.   However, they are of the opinion that some of Part Two is too much weighted in the direction of detailed development control policies and not always clearly enough linked to delivery of the spatial vision and objectives set out in the two fictional examples.   Therefore, the ODPM have advised that Part Two should not be taken as a ‘model’ of spatial planning and it encourages local planning authorities to see if they can rationalise their development control policies into a smaller set of generic policies linked to the delivery of strategic objectives.”

POS intends to publish a revised version of Part Two of this Guide when sufficient examples of ‘real world’ good practice are available.

Guide to Policy Content for Spatial Plans - complete press release (44.544Kb) - DOWNLOAD

See the full Guide by clicking here