Community Led Planning

Community Led Planning (CLP) has long been promoted by AMT across England and has provided a very effective way of empowering communities to identify issues and deliver appropriate local solutions.

Does your Community Plan need a revamp? Find out about our Community Plan MOT service here.

CLP guidance for local authorities

AMT has been working with Action for Communities in Rural England (ACRE) on a joint project to increase awareness of the practical ways that local authorities can make the most of CLP.

The project has drawn on existing resources and examples of best practice from across England and the result is this new publication.

Download Making the Most of Community Led Planning: a best practice guide for local authorities {opens pdf}

CLP guidance for small towns

This new Action for Market Towns handbook provides a step-by-step guide to setting up and completing a Community Led Plan for a small town.

It is based on an original Countryside Agency handbook, but updated with current best practice, resources and references.

Find out more about the Town Action Planning Framework and downloadable handbook

What is a Community Plan?

Community Plans seek to provide a vision for the future of a settlement and plans for how to achieve this vision. All forms of community plan are based on thorough consultation with all parts and interest groups from the community.

The role of a Community Plan:

To bring the community together around a vision and an initial task list to take that vision forward
To enable partners to support that vision, by linking to it and addressing relevant aspects of the task list

LEAD – An overarching framework for CLP

LEAD is a framework that has been developed jointly by AMT and ACRE to illustrate, at the simplest level, the key steps that underpin any Community Led Plan.

It refers to a logical sequence of activities that community groups are expected to undertake to produce plans that achieve high rates of participation, are linked in with local service providers and result in well-researched actions that meet local need. Find out more in our Policy into Practice Paper below.

AMT Policy Documents

AMT’s Policy Position Statement

View AMT’s Policy Position Statement on CLP (opens pdf), which details our commitments to CLP.

AMT’s Policy into Practice Paper
We have developed a Policy into Practice Paper which introduces what CLP is and how you can use it effectively in your town, with a range of best practice case studies.

Download the CLP Policy into Practice Paper (AMT members only)

The CLP Jargon Buster
To help you unravel the hierarchy of local government plans and how your community plan links to them.

Visit the CLP Jargon buster (AMT members only)

AMT’s Campaign Plan
Our Campaign Plan sets out how we are addressing the challenges laid out in the Policy Position Statement. Some of these we are leading on ourselves, some in partnership with others, and some we are purely supporting the work of others.

View the CLP Campaign Spreadsheet

Community Led Planning and the Coalition Government
One of the new Coalition government’s key policies is to devolve power to a more local level. Our briefing note looks at how we can achieve this through Community Led Planning.

Download the briefing note: ‘Community Led Planning and Government Policy’

AMT research in Northumberland shows how this Coalition policy can draw on the rural experience.

Download: ‘Involving People in Planning: Rural Experience Shows How to Deliver Coalition’s Ambitions’ (AMT members only)
Go to AMT’s Strategic Information Service Library to download ‘Executive Summary: Northumberland Community Empowerment Research May 2010′ (AMT members only)

Ongoing Work

The Empowerment Fund
AMT was granted funding from Communities and Local Government to undertake further work on Community Led Planning.

Find out more about the Empowerment Fund.

Joint work with the Carnegie UK Trust
AMT, in conjunction with the Carnegie UK Trust, Integreat Yorkshire, Planning Aid and amt-i, has recently completed a study into CLP exploring how communities can better influence the public sector.

View the paper on Community Led Planning {opens Word doc}

How can you help?

Tell us about your experiences of Community Led Planning - good and bad. The more information we have from you, the more we can learn from each other.

Are you in a unitary authority? We’re keen to find out how Community Led Planning operates in unitary areas, especially newly-formed ones.

We want to assess how top-down (statutory processes) can most effectively meet bottom-up (local communities) in terms of putting together plans and making sure that the Community Led Plan does influence local authority plans.

We would like to benchmark different approaches across the country against each other and encourage an exchange of good practice and lessons learnt from the local authorities’ perspectives. We are equally interested in assessing how to maximise the towns’ strategic influence.