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Promoting vibrant and viable small towns

Community Led Planning

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

A framework for town-sized Community Led Planning

Town Action Planning FrameworkThis 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.
  • Enabling 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 can be implemented to meet local need.  Find out more in our Policy into Practice Paper below.

AMT Policy Documents

AMT’s Policy Position Statement

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.

The CLP Jargon Buster

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

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.

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.

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

Ongoing Work

The Empowerment Fund

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

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.

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.

  • If you are situated within a unitary authority and would like to take part in this work, please contact Alison at: Alison.Eardley@towns.org.uk

An example – CLP in Wiltshire

As an example of CLP in a unitary authority, Len Turner, Manager of the Mid Wiltshire Economic Partnership, talks about his experience:

“In April 2009 Wiltshire changed from a two-tier Council system to a Unitary Authority. Following the June elections the county now has eighteen Area Boards situated around the market towns and their hinterlands, working as the devolved arm of the Council at local level.

Wiltshire’s submission to Central Government for Unitary Authority was successful in the main due to its promise of support for Community Led Planning. The structure outlined in the bid, which is now in practice across the county, is that each Community Area Partnership (CAP) is acknowledged by the Council as the lead body on developing local plans. CAPs will work closely with their Area Board and local services to ensure wide and inclusive community consultation.

Wiltshire Council has encouraged this role to the extent of giving each of the Community Area Partnerships a seat on the Area Boards as well as on a number of key strategic networks that meet throughout the year, notably the Wiltshire Assembly (LSP).

In addition to this the new Council is supporting the Partnerships with core funding to enable them to operate effectively and ensure the plans are living, developing documents, continually reviewing the community’s needs and priorities.

The whole system is obviously in its early stages and so evaluation would be premature but with the first tranche of Area Board meetings complete the consensus is positive and working relationships are beginning to form.

By the end of this year Wiltshire will have twenty Community Area Partnerships acknowledged throughout the county as the principal player responsible for community consultation and planning.”

More information

For more information, please also see ACRE’s website which is dedicated to CLP.

Community Led Planning is one of AMT’s key campaign areas.