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The Planning Officers Society is aiming to define what an excellent service would consist of in practical terms through its work on "Moving Towards Excellence". This work involves a series of papers which are being published by POS and I&DeA over coming months.
The results of the survey on resources for planning services indicate widespread concern about the time and other resource needed to conduct reviews. So it is hoped that anything that helps pressurised planners, by making the job of best value review and continuous improvement a little easier, will be of interest.
The Moving towards Excellence work is intended to be of value in a number of ways :
- First it is a self assessment framework for evaluating a planning service.
- Second it supports the drive for continuous improvement.
- Third its a tool for Managers to use to ensure that they are achieving Government priorities.
- Fourth it provides a benchmark for practitioners when they come to consider where they want their service to be.
- Fifth its a guide to recognised best practice.
- Finally it assists in identifying gaps in present service provision and helps one to map out one's improvement plan.
The new Compendium on "Moving towards excellence in Planning" is therefore intended to assist Planners with what they need to do to raise the standard and quality of their service into the realms of excellence. It is an aspirational document which describes in detail the character of the very best services and as such defines critical success factors for the service together with essential features of an excellent service around the areas of :
- policy
- customer focus
- processes and procedures
- performance measurement and outcomes
The Compendium is designed to help those who want to look at the Planning service as a whole. It has an overview of the service as a whole supplemented by shortened versions of three of the original four independent excellence papers on Policy, Development control and Design and Conservation.
The compendium can be viewed in the planning "toolkit" on IDeA Knowledge website.
Fuller and more up to date versions of the separate papers on Policy, Development control and Design and conservation, together, with the fourth paper on Minerals and Waste, will appear on the IDeA website in the next few months. In the meantime the original draft versions of those papers will remain on this web site for reference:
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MTE in Development Control (346.251Kb) - DOWNLOAD |
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MTE in Planning Policy (89.797Kb) - DOWNLOAD |
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MTE in Minerals & Waste Planning (111.05Kb) - DOWNLOAD |
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MTE in Design and Conservation (156.481Kb) - DOWNLOAD |
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MTE in Public Spaces and Open Spaces (364.032Kb) - DOWNLOAD |
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MTE in Land Use Transportation Policy (214.016Kb) - DOWNLOAD |
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MTE in Regeneration (297.984Kb) - DOWNLOAD |
Work is underway on new papers covering Regeneration and Transport. These will be placed on the IDeA website as soon as they are ready ( so watch out for their publication). Further work is planned, though not yet started, on a broader picture of the public realm and on specific areas such as archaeology, landscape and nature conservation. In each case the work will focus on the role of the Planner in each area.
A major review of the excellence work is planned in mid 2004. It will pick up the various changes to the system that will feature in the forthcoming Planning Act together with other changes that impact fundamentally on the Planning service - particularily around comprehensive performance assessment - arising from the Government's broader modernisation agenda. |
