Neighbourhood planning: are there lesson to indicate how planners should support plan-making?
Dave Chapman is Director of Triformis Ltd, supporting all forms of community led planning and development. Dave also volunteers with Planning Aid England.
Neighbourhood planning and community involvement
Since 2012 neighbourhood planning appears to have motivated people to engage in plan-making for their communities in ways not seen before. In 2025 the government reported that there are 1,800 made plans and many others in production. Given that plan-making (at any level) is challenging, the numbers of people engaged in neighbourhood planning raises the question of why so many people have volunteered their free time.
Whilst neighbourhood planning is not perfect and its evaluation has been mixed (Parker et al., 2023), it seems to me to have been anchored, whether by design or inadvertently, in a key aspect of current planning theory. Having spoken to a significant number of individuals and groups involved in neighbourhood planning over the last 14 years, I have begun to wonder if this is why it has been so popular and what this might indicate for the future of plan-making and the planner’s role. This is not to say that everybody involved in neighbourhood planning understands, or has an interest in, planning theory (I suspect that most don’t) but rather that the practice of neighbourhood planning has enabled the engagement of local people in plan-making.
Collaborative approaches
Planning theory has long suggested that collaborative approaches can lead to collectively owned solutions. As planning theory should inform planning practice, it follows that plan-making should be collaborative in its approach.
Whilst recognising its flaws, neighbourhood planning appears to have used several collaborative approaches and methodologies. It also seems to have enabled people to recognise that plan-making is not easy and there are no simple linear solutions to creating sustainable neighbourhoods. In short, neighbourhood planning has resulted in more people knowing that plan-making is a wicked problem (Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Rittel and Webber,1973) even if they do not know what a wicked problem is. Many individuals and groups I have spoken to recognise:
- There is no one solution and problems must be solved and re-solved;
- Solutions are subjective and either good or bad based on an individual’s interest and value judgements;
- Problems are unique, not the same, and often extraordinarily complex; and
- There is no ultimate ‘end’, as every problem is a symptom of another problem.
In many cases, I feel that neighbourhood planning has also resulted in closer engagement of communities with local planning authorities. Recognition that plan-making is not easy and is an on-going iterative and dynamic process has resulted in me hearing more often ‘we need to work together to resolve this’ rather than ‘why don’t they do something about it.’
Collaborative planning
That planners should convene and support collaborative processes is a conclusion the planning literature has reached many times. My personal practical learning from neighbourhood planning is that this is about involving and engaging a wider range of stakeholders than is often currently achieved in plan-making. It is about conversations with people you may not otherwise meet, in places you may not otherwise go to, and facilitating spaces for the ensuing discussions to try to establish common ground to move forward from.
The need for planners and professionals to promote wider collaboration is not easy, given the context of the hierarchical, procedural, ordered control of many public bureaucracies alongside the need to give it sufficient time (collaborative approaches take longer). However, if well facilitated, collaborative approaches can help to capture and balance the range of competing interests (residents, public service providers, political, developers, etc.), ensure inclusion of all voices and opinions and establish common ground and consensus as to the best way forward. Ultimately this can lead to less contention and challenge in plan-making by empowering people to understand and accept compromise.
Planners leadership and behaviours
To support collaborative approaches, we need to develop collaborative relationships, an interdisciplinary approach, one that brings together diverse networks, with a focus on people and on knowledge, and one which establishes open and inclusive processes. Supporting groups to prepare neighbourhood plans has meant presenting facts, illuminating the rules of the planning system, advocating for those not present in discussions, facilitating different interests to listen to each other’s positions, seeking to find consensus and continuing to seek to act in the wider public interest.
At a time of further changes to the planning system, I therefore wonder if there is need to take a breath, step back a little and consider what lessons we might learn from neighbourhood planning about collaborative approaches and how we should grow as planning professionals to support such collaboration.
