What is Community Led Planning?

Community Led Planning is a step-by-step structured process, taken on by local community activists, to create a vision for a community and an action plan to achieve it.  The process involves using a mix of evidence collection, different types of consultation and debate at the very local neighbourhood level.  It is designed to be a process in which each and every citizen can participate and results in very high levels of participation. The resulting vision covers the social, economic, environmental and cultural well-being of the community and all those who live and work there.

A community led plan is not just about land-use, but about shaping and sustaining services, facilities and the local environment in a way that meets the needs of present and future residents, community groups and local businesses.  It celebrates positive features and activities, highlights local priorities and contains a detailed action plan (model Action Plan example) which can be taken on by public service providers and the local community itself. 

Because it is led by local people, a wide range of issues are addressed in ways that are meaningful to the community itself.  Dialogue within the community increases local people’s understanding of the needs of all residents, particularly those disadvantaged by lack of mobility, lack of employment or skills, or people that are marginalised for other reasons. 

What makes Community Led Planning distinctive is that, done well, it involves building the relationship between service providers and local communities as part of the plan development itself.  Because it is made up of actions to be taken on by local volunteers, community groups, local government and other service providers, it produces more impressive results than can be achieved through a top-down approach to consultation by local government to feed their own strategic plans. A community led plan challenges local people to say what part they can play in improving their own local neighbourhood and builds the capacity of local community groups to respond. Additional benefits are that the proposed actions and solutions have already been tested out and are more likely to be realistic and achievable by all partners working together. 

Independent facilitation is a crucial element of delivering high quality plans because local activists tasked with organising the plan development can be challenged to be as inclusive as possible and rigorously explore any options or solutions that arise.   External facilitation is also more likely to achieve the required involvement of local authority officers, public service providers and elected members in the debate within the community about what the action plan should contain.

Community Led Planning has been the accepted approach for community consultation in most rural communities for many decades, backed by government policy and past investment in its delivery.  Over 4,000 communities have so far engaged in the process and the benefits and outcomes have been formally researched and evaluated. The practitioners who have supported these communities have developed a comprehensive neighbourhood and parish planning toolkit to guide communities through the planning process and have assembled a variety of resources that can be used to enhance the processes quality and inclusivity. The particular relevance to rural communities is that planning was needed to organise community action in communities which are more likely to own their public facilities such as halls and playing fields and manage local services through the role of parish and town councils and other community groups.

Community Led Planning is now the aspiration within government policy for all communities.  It is central to the challenge presented to local government in building empowered communities everywhere.  As a result, the framework underpinning Community Led Planning is increasingly being implemented in urban neighbourhoods as an effective way of stimulating local action and making the connections with statutory plans and the agencies required to deliver them.

How widespread is Community Led Planning?

• Over 4,000 communities across England have so far engaged in some form of Community Led Planning
• It includes specific approaches to Community Led Planning suitable for specific contexts, for instance Market Town Healthchecks/Action Plans and Parish Plans
• A conservative estimate of the number of people benefiting in some way from the use of all Community Led Plans is 7.2 million