When finding land development opportunities in England, you’re likely to come across neighbourhood and local plans. While at a smaller scale, neighbourhood plans can be surprisingly powerful, even allocating 23% more housing than targeted in an ONH study.
Read on to learn the five key differences between neighbourhood plans vs local plans, and how to identify plans and stay ahead of local planning changes.
1. Objectives
Neighbourhood plans and local plans might overlap in the same area, but they each have different objectives.
Neighbourhood Plan Objectives
Neighbourhood plans are about giving communities the power to shape their own local area. This means local residents and workers can have a say in where new homes, shops and offices should be built, set design preferences or even determine necessary infrastructure.
As a grassroots planning approach, neighbourhood plans aim to develop areas in a way that meets the needs and aspirations of a local community. Although small, neighbourhood plans form an important part of the statutory development plan once approved at a referendum, giving them the power to guide local planning decisions in future.
Local Plan Objectives
Local plans, on the other hand, cover an entire local authority area and are often more strategic than neighbourhood plans. A local plan may cover:
- Housing targets
- Infrastructure development
- Environmental protections
- General land-use allocations.
While a local plan will focus more on delivering overall growth and sustainable development for an area, it’s also designed to complement neighbourhood plans and can cover more small-scale community planning decisions where needed.
You can explore and analyse land data on our Landstack platform, showing your Draft and Adopted neighbourhood plans and local plans across England. Book a demo with our team to learn how our platform makes finding land faster, smarter and stress-free.
2. Leadership
As you might have guessed, the difference in objectives between neighbourhood and local plans means they also have differences in leadership.
When a community wants to create a neighbourhood plan, legislation allows the following three kinds of organisation, or qualifying bodies, to lead it:
- A parish or town council
- A neighbourhood forum with a minimum of 21 individuals
- A community organisation where locals can become voting members
By contrast, local plans are delivered by the local planning authority. This may be a:
- District council
- London borough
- Metropolitan district
- Unitary authority
- National park authority
Each authority is responsible for strategic planning in their area, balancing public and environmental interests alongside development and economic needs. However, it is worth considering that only 1 in 5 English local authorities has an up-to-date local plan.
3. Scale
To help you understand the difference in scale between neighbourhood and local plans, let’s look at some of our Landstack mapping.
As you can see in the aerial view below, a neighbourhood plan focuses closely on a localised area such as a town, village or community. The advantage of this smaller scale is that it allows communities to focus in detail on their unique characteristics and needs that might not be identified in the wider local plan.
For example, a neighbourhood plan might outline precise locations for new housing, businesses or community facilities. Where the local plan offers an overarching planning framework, the neighbourhood plan can offer detailed guidance.
If we now zoom out to the scale of a local plan, you’ll see how this covers a much broader geographical area, such as a district, borough or national park. At a larger scale, local plans focus on strategic challenges, like meeting housing demand across different communities, providing infrastructure and protecting environmental resources.
4. Legal Status
Once a neighbourhood plan is approved through a local referendum, as we’ve covered, it becomes part of the statutory development plan. This means that, while focusing on a smaller area, a neighbourhood plan still holds the same legal status as a local plan.
It’s worth keeping in mind, though, that neighbourhood plans aren’t a legal requirement for communities. Instead, they’re an option, providing a way for communities to set out a vision for how they want their neighbourhood to develop over the next 10, 15 or 20 years.
For communities that do want to create a neighbourhood plan, there’s an additional incentive of funding through the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL). This means communities with an approved neighbourhood plan can receive 25% of the revenue generated from developments in their area, which can then be reinvested to benefit local people.
Local plans, on the other hand, are legally required documents within the Local Development Schemes required by the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004. However, as you’ll know, the majority of local plans in England aren’t updated regularly.
5. Planning Permission
One final difference between neighbourhood plans and local plans is in planning permission.
Neighbourhood plans have access to Neighbourhood Development Orders (NDOs) and Community Right to Build Orders. These allow communities to grant planning permission directly for specific types of development or sites in their area. This allows for simpler and faster development, for example, in the allocation of housing.
While local plans can’t directly grant planning permission, you can instead consider them as a framework within which all planning applications are evaluated, supporting and working alongside the neighbourhood plan.
View Neighbourhood Plans and Local Plans in Landstack
Whether you’re a buyer, developer, architect, agent, planner or local organisation, we hope this guide has helped you understand the five essential differences between neighbourhood plans vs local plans.
At Landstack, we’ve just mapped neighbourhood plans to our land information platform, alongside local plan policies, providing you with planning and development data across Great Britain.
To learn more about how Landstack can help you find land, book a demo with our team.