Planning advice

Volunteer roles

Our volunteer roles are evolving constantly. Our Planning Advisors will provide you with all the materials/resources and support you need to carry out any activity.

Neighbourhood Planning support

To deliver our range of activities, we require team leaders, facilitators, specialist topic deliverers and general support volunteers.

Awareness raising events

Volunteers can help raise the profile of Planning Aid England and what we do. This can be done through a short presentation or a promotional stand at an event.

Publicity/media

If you have an interest in promoting our services or ensuring success stories get out into the public domain, you could get involved in sending out promotional material, contacting other organisations, helping with press work, writing newsletter articles, taking photographs, liaising with political contacts or helping support us to maintain an up-to-date social networking presence.

Front Runner liaison

To keep on top of emerging good practice and learning outcomes from the neighbourhood planning front runners, we need volunteers to act as a point of contact to gather information from these groups and feed back to our Planning Advisors.

Advice Line

Volunteers are needed to support the Advice Line (both telephone and email enquiries). To ensure we offer the best service, we only allow Chartered members of the RTPI to give professional advice on behalf of Planning Aid England.

Chartered members based in or near to London can help deliver advice from the office base at the RTPI. Those who are further away can still offer their services through a call back system or through email support. Non-Chartered members can also get involved at the London office by distributing call backs or forwarding emails (see also casework below).

Casework

As a casework volunteer you will be assigned to helpline callers to the Advice Line who meet our eligibility criteria, and will provide free, independent and impartial professional support. (This will mainly be corporate members but there may be certain exceptions depending on the case).

Some of the things casework volunteers might do include assisting with making representations on large schemes, assisting with making a planning appeal, assisting with a planning statement, helping fill in application forms and explaining the information needed to be submitted with planning applications.

There are also opportunities for office based volunteers, who work under the supervision of our Planning Advisors to assign cases to suitable volunteers.

Writing web-based resources

Get involved in preparing and maintaining up to date information for our webpages, including advice sheets on good practice, tips on how to get involved in planning, best practice case studies and guidance on the planning process.