Neighbourhood Plan costs (not funding) - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

Those who took part in the benchmark will have been capturing the time taken to support neighbourhood planning. This is a question that we're very interested in, and the snapshot provided by the benchmark is better than a guess. You can expect us to provide an anonymous and aggregated view on this in a while ...

Thanks Richard. I'm not sure I'm following you exactly and perhaps the opening post wasn't clear but I'm interested in the costs to the parish/town council or forum. I am getting a lot of neighbourhood groups and parish councils asking how much money they will need to complete a neighbourhood plan. Assuming the evidence they need can be mostly taken from the Council's own evidence base, the only large costs I can identify are publicity and printing and these don't approach the minimum 17,000 figure we've been given.

This is a difficult area. We have only just set out on our NP and are relying very heavily on local volunteers (me included). I would agree with Dan on the face of it the significant out of pocket costs are going to publicity, meeting rooms, document printing and publication, map preparation, community surveys and expert advice. The costs will vary widely depending upon whether your Parish Council and LPA have resources in house and can make them available without charge - that can be a very big ask for a small PC. Our LPA has advised that the costs to them will be £12,000 for Examination Costs and £8,000 for Referendum costs. I have no feel for whether these costs are reasonable. As you are aware there is no obligation for the LPA to pass on any of the Govt £30k (it is not ring-fenced) to the PC/NPF although they do have a duty of support. It is unclear whether they can charge for those support resources.

My Parish Councul has been on the N/Hood Plan road for 15 months now and costs, including "Admin Support" (which is me as Clerk) have come to £6,500 so far (though I have been paid nothing yet for the 295 hours worked!). We have a consultant who will bring everything together at the project end, and produce the "glossy document" - we are fortunate in that he has a passion for this sort of thing, and will only charge us at the end - total costs for him expected to be £3,500 including the printing. Other costs have been room hire, mapping, stationery, phone calls etc, projector and screen for public meetings. Together with 3 Clerk colleagues my Parish Council hasbeen campaigning hard to get DCLG to change the way it funds N/Hood Planning - i.e. the funds should go straight to Parishes, who would then pay the Principal Authority for examination and referendum at the end - we get very little extra help from the Principal Authority. A recent challenge was made by us that the £5,000 paid to the Principal Authority for our designated area was sitting in their coffers, when we neded finance - eventually it has been agreed we can "apply" for £4,000 of this, which we have but we had to "justify" the expenditure when, of course, the Principal Authority didn't have to - they just claimed it and DCLG paid it! If we get this £4,000 it will offset some of our costs, but anticipate we shall need another £8,000 at the end of the project to balance the budget - we are going ahead on faith - watch this space - hard slog though - I loved the recent Planning Advisory Service bulletin, in which was guidance for Principal Authorities in assisting Pasrishes with N/Hood Planning - it would be good if we had a fraction of that support Rusty

Further to Kirsty’s original post a year ago, if anyone involved in preparing any of the neighbourhood plans that have been adopted/ reached the latter stages is able to offer an insight into what the total cost to the parish council/ neighbourhood forum has been that would be very useful.

One of the key questions being asked by those considering neighbourhood planning remains ‘how much will it cost the parish council/ neighbourhood forum?’

Thank you in advance.

We are fairly well advanced with our NP in that we hope to get our draft plan ready in the next month or so.

We are a Parish of some 1250 dwellings (2,900 residents) and a modest precept of £34K.

We can get meeting places quite cheaply - £10-20 a night so that really isn't a major item of expense. Our LPA drewdown £5k on the strength of our designation but refused to share that with us. The Parish Council voted to allocate £2K to get us started and on the strength of that we called a public meeting and 12 residents - including 3 parish councillors (one of which subsequently resigned from the PC to have more time to dedicate to the NP) - volunteered to form the NP Steering Group.

We set about drawing up a budget guided by the fact the we had a fair idea of what problems we were going to face - for example, we had a traffic/parking issue; a bordering flood plain that was a target for development and needed careful evaluation and a need for a complete Parish survey. We were lucky to have 2 professional surveyors on our Steering Group who had a professional knowledge of planning.

With those facts to hand, we estimated £1.5k for a traffic consultant, £2k hydrologist/flood plain survey and £2.5k for a planning consultant. We estimated the cost of printing our own parish survey (3,000 copies of a questionnaire - to be hand-delivered to every household by volunteers) at £1.5k. To this we added £1.5k for miscellaneous expenses such as meetings, publicity, etc. That gave us a total budget of around £9k. We applied for the DCLG grant and were awarded the maximum of £7k which, with the £2K from the PC should have been sufficient, however, the questionnaire was larger than expected and the cost under-estimated and we will need to find at least another £3k to carry us through to Examiner stage.

As we are in our second fiscal year we hope to source another £2K from the Parish Council and that might need a small increase in precept; We are also looking at other grant sources.  One other possibility is to approach local community organisations and residemts for help with the funding; our overall consultation has been quite successul (for example we received over 750 returns to our survey questionnaire from a total of 1234 dwellings, so support for the NP is quite strong and suggests that we could raise any balance of funding locally if other grants are not forthcoming.

I hope that this background helps fledgling NP's - I am really quite surprised that DCLG and LPAs haven't got together and organised regiional workshops where 'ezperience' NP could share ideas and experience with fledglings...our LPA now has 12 NPs and I am hoping to get such a seminar/workshop going locally (some funding for room hire and a couple of speakers would help, because it isn't coming from our meagre budget!).

WIll Chapman

Vice Chair, Alrewas Neighbourhood Plan

http://alrewasplan.co.uk 

 

I have been asked by one of our parishes for some advice on this matter and, without avoiding the question, i've had to say that costs will largely reflect what they want their plan to do.

If the parish wants to address parking/highway issues then a consultant and modelling exercise will push costs up. Likewise, wishing to incorporate a locally detailed GI or environmental development and management programme (the emerging local plan already has a district wide one) will potentially involve survey work that may need to be done over the course of a whole year.

The parish's principal development site has already gone through, so 10% extra CIL on what's left to develop after they get a plan in place will not amount to much. I'm expecting that anything other than a very basic NP will end up as a significant net cost to them.

The cost of preparing neighbourhood plans was raised by delegates at the PAS neighbourhood planning workshop in London last Tuesday.

Of course the short anwer is that it depends on what the plan is going to cover, what skills are present in the group, what evidence and assistance can be passed on from the local authority  and whether consultants are employed.  But as more and more groups are making progress towards the submission of their plans, it seems a good time to reactivate this discussion thread and see if there is more information to share.

 

The cost of preparing neighbourhood plans was raised by delegates at the PAS neighbourhood planning workshop in London last Tuesday.

Of course the short anwer is that it depends on what the plan is going to cover, what skills are present in the group, what evidence and assistance can be passed on from the local authority  and whether consultants are employed.  But as more and more groups are making progress towards the submission of their plans, it seems a good time to reactivate this discussion thread and see if there is more information to share.

 

No-one seems to have mentioned the government funding made available through Locality specifically for neighbourhood planning.  Follow the link: below:

http://mycommunityrights.org.uk/neighbourhood-planning/