Why invest time and resources in Community Led Planning?

Benefits for local communities:

Communities taking on the challenge of developing a community led plan find their efforts rewarded in many ways.  Done well, a plan will produce the following benefits for individual residents and the community as a whole:

• Provides a chance for everyone to be involved in local decision-making
• Builds individual skills and confidence
• Engages different sections of the community in debate, generating better mutual understanding about needs and aspirations
• Makes things happen, through sharing knowledge and ideas
• Kickstarts new local projects and improves access to external funding
• Brings forward new volunteers to support local community action
• Delivers more influence with local government and other public service providers
• Builds better relationships with local government, service providers and other partners that contribute to community life
• Establishes a mutually agreed long term vision for the community that can be taken forward by the community and partners needed to deliver it.

Benefits for local government and local service providers:

The new Local Government Performance Framework sets out a vision for engagement with local citizens and community groups.  Local authorities that invest in the Community Led Planning approach have already seen how it can deliver against many of the requirements for such engagement in a cost effective and productive way.  The following outcomes have been demonstrated in the many community led plans which form the case studies and the evidence base that has led to the development of this website.

High quality Community Led Planning:

• Delivers genuine community engagement and involvement to meet social, economic, environmental and cultural objectives
• Delivers very high rates of participation
• Reaches those traditionally excluded from formal consultation approaches
• Avoids consultation fatigue by involving local residents in a coordinated way in which they take ownership of the process and the result
• Maximises use of local facilities and services, increasing their cost effectiveness
• Improves visibility of local services and service providers  
• Provides access to community-based information that would otherwise be hard to obtain
• Harnesses community action and local volunteering to improve the quality of local services
• Highlights the community’s priorities and opportunities to help build high quality Sustainable Community Strategies
• Improves a community’s access to external funding from charitable, regional and national sources of finance
• Generates opportunities to deliver effective neighbourhood governance
• Gives credibility to the advocacy of elected representatives
• Reinvigorates local democracy by increasing voter turnout and generates increased interest in standing for election.