Planning from the ground up: Neighbourhood governance and the future of development 

This blog is part of a series written by organisations championing community power. As new neighbourhood governance arrangements are introduced across England through the English Devolution and Community Empowerment Bill, each blog explores how neighbourhood governance can enable local people to have real influence over their places. The series accompanies A Blueprint for Community-Powered Neighbourhood Governance, written by We’re Right Here, with input from Local Trust, Hope Not Hate, Locality, and Power to Change.

We’re Right Here’s research found that 84% of people feel they have ‘not very much’ or ‘no control’ over decisions that affect their neighbourhood or local community. The principles behind We’re Right Here’s proposed community covenants aim to correct this, ensuring that local people are genuinely embedded in neighbourhood governance.

To really test this idea, how about applying it to an area with even lower levels of influence and trust? Take planning and development. Polling for Grosvenor found that twice as many people report a negative rather than a positive impact from development in their area, and 93% distrust local council planners and 98% distrust developers to make decisions that will be positive for their community.

This is pretty staggering. Almost nobody trusts, or feels they can influence, an industry that sees £120bn flow through our neighbourhoods each year, and that fundamentally shapes our lives – whether we have affordable homes, suitable community facilities, access to green space.

The government’s new draft National Planning Policy Framework says that when councils draw up their local planning policy, they should “engage positively with communities and other key stakeholders, at appropriate points during their preparation and using a range of methods, so that relevant issues are identified and addressed as early as possible during the plan-making process”.

So, a very simple suggestion would be that a community-led neighbourhood governance arrangement is empowered to become statutory consultees in that process. Bring the local representatives in from the earliest stages to identify issues and help to shape policies relevant to their neighbourhood. This could help to speed up the process (which the government wants to run much faster) without weakening community input.

A key step for this engagement would be when the council identifies and allocates land for development. A community-led neighbourhood governance arrangement could help to review potential sites in their neighbourhood and make proposals for community priorities that could be met on certain sites, such as affordable homes, community space or other social infrastructure. These priorities could be included in the detail of site allocations, and the local council would have to set out why it did, or didn’t, accept each proposal.

Where appropriate, the local representatives could also propose sites that should be allocated specifically for community-led development. Perhaps where they’re particularly sensitive, or include Assets of Community Value, or where there is a clear opportunity to consolidate connected assets in a local community organisation. This would introduce a presumption that the developer partners with a suitable community body (as already defined in national planning policy), which could then codesign the development and take ownership of key assets on completion.

A neighbourhood plan in Cambridgeshire has already done this on a site that was very sensitive in the local community. The policy gives reassurance to local people that they will be closely involved in how it is developed, probably through the local Community Land Trust.

Where no obvious body already exists, the neighbourhood governance arrangement in place could help to establish one. Community Land Trust Network is supporting the pilot Community Covenant in Market Drayton and two parish councils to explore this with Shropshire Council in relation to a large publicly owned site likely to be developed in the near future. We’re also hoping to explore this in an event with We’re Right Here and the Manchester Social Housing Commission later in the spring, building on work with a community alliance in Wythenshawe. What’s great is that none of this needs new legislation, the toolkit is there if councils and communities can make use of it.

All of this could help the Community Right to Buy work properly. Local Plans can condition the value of land and buildings by specifying acceptable types of development. This puts communities in a stronger position to buy the land or develop the land in partnership. If the land were an Asset of Community Value and went up for sale, the market valuation would have to take account of the planning policy when deciding on its value.

This would all add up to a sort of light-touch version of neighbourhood plans. It would give local communities a powerful input into how their neighbourhood is developed, without requiring that they go to the extra effort of a full neighbourhood plan process.

Neighbourhood forums point to some lessons to ensure that community-led neighbourhood governance arrangements are genuinely democratic, representative and accountable, as do the planning policy definition of ‘community-led development’ and the statutory definition of a Community Land Trust. Accountability would be further strengthened in this case because it will ultimately be the council setting the final policy.

Read A Blueprint for Community-Powered Neighbourhood Governance