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.

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.

AMT’s Policy Position Statement

 To view AMT’s Policy Position Statement on CLP, which details our commitments to CLP, click here (opens pdf).

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.  To download the whole paper, click here .  

The CLP Jargon Buster

To help you unravel the hierarchy of local government plans and how your community plan links to them, please visit the CLP Jargon buster.

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. 

To view the word document please click here.  We have also put the plan into a spreadsheet which illustrates which area of our work is addressing which challenge.  To view the spreadsheet click here.

Empowerment Funding for Community Led Planning
In 2009 AMT received Empowerment Funding from the Department for Communities and Local Government. There are a number of key needs that we believe need to be addressed to increase AMT’s capacity, capability and reach to support the further advancement of community-led planning.

AMT has identified these needs by consulting widely with partnerships across England via its regional networks and through initiating a review of community-led planning approaches with key partners including Carnegie UK, ACRE, NALC and the Urban Forum.

In particular, we will be using the funding to:

• Increase capacity and early involvement in the planning process through the development of streamlined advice for networks operating within local communities, which offers practical support in helping them to align community planning with the statutory planning process, underpinned by a standardised and quality-assured approach.

• Increase capacity through the transfer of good practice in environmental issues and the involvement in the delivery of affordable housing, with the sharing of knowledge and related skills between 100 town partnerships.

• Extend the reach of CLP by contributing to 10 pilot interventions in strategy/ policy documents published by strategic bodies or initiatives proposed in the Communities in control: real people, real power White Paper.

We’ll be updating this page with further information on the empowerment fund shortly, so please do check back.

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.  You can download the report by clicking here.

How you can help?
There are a number of ways in which you can help us to improve the CLP process:

• Send us details of your experiences of community-led planning – good and bad – the more information we have from you, the more we can learn from each other.

CLP and unitary authorities
One area we are particularly interested in learning more about is 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 ensuring that the community led plan does influence local authority plans.

We would like to benchmark different approaches across the country against each and facilitate 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 us 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 here:

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 succesful 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 have 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 on CLP, please also see ACRE’s website which is dedicated to this: