The National Planning Policy Guidance - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)
The National Planning Policy Guidance
I've been surprised by how little 'chatter' there has been about this. Is that because it is fit for purpose? Or just so 'meh' people can't get worked up enough to comment.
It would help me to know where you think there are issues with the guidance. Not about paragraph numbers or whether there should be a printable PDF. But where the content raises issues that practitioners are finding it hard to interpret or use.
Partly because I'm just interested in your views, but it will also help us at PAS understand where we can change our support to help.
To get you going.........the housing and economic assessment bits. Sensible to combine? Do they give you enough detail?
Alice Lester
PAS
My take on why there has not been much chatter on this, is that there’s a lot of stuff to take in, and with apologies for talking about paragraph numbers, it’s not helped by the way its presented with the need to click on paragraph headings to reveal more text on different pages.
Just looking at the Advertisement section, there are 7 headings and around 80 sub-paragraphs. Not the sort of thing you would want to use unless you had a specific question. For me it would be better just to have an indexed section on one page and with the paras numbered.
The other disappointment is that the links to regulations (which are a good idea), do not link to a consolidated version of the regs, but generally to the original reg, or the update in isolation. I had thought that this was something that Taylor had advocated as part of the new approach.
But maybe these comments are from someone who would really like it to be just on paper!
No comment on why there has been so little chatter.
But I do have a question.
Para 037 of the 'Housing and Economic Land Availability Assessment' states that local planning authorities should count housing provided for older people, including residential institutions in Use Class C2, against their housing requirement.' However, no guidance is provided on how we should do this. Does one nursing home count as one unit in the supply calculation? Or does each bedroom within a nursing home count as one unit?
I'd be interested to know how other local planning authorities are approaching this and to hear PAS's views.
Katharine Smith
Exeter City council
Ian McDonald, modified 9 Years ago.
The National Planning Policy Guidance
Enthusiast Posts: 70 Join Date: 15/05/12 Recent PostsI am awaiting to receive the Government's Housing Flow Reconciliation form for the year ending 31 March 2014 to see how they would deal with this. See other thread regarding when to record C2 units in https://khub.net/group/planningadvisoryservicepas/forum/-/message_boards/message/12516635.
Hi Katherine,
I think the answer is a very boring, but hopefully pragmatic one. You ought to be able to get some pretty useful secondary data from universities, hospitals, even estate agents, about the levels of housing take-up by those specific populations. If you find out nurses tend to live in shared houses, usually 3 or 4 to a dwelling, then divide the number of bed spaces in the C2 accommodation by 3 or 4 to approximate how many houses could be freed up.
You may also need to subtract a percentage for those who commute from outside the authority boundary, or who already lived in the area to begin with.
This is clearly over-simplifying, but I would certainly advise against costly and time consuming primary data (surveys and the like) which will only give you the same information.
If anyone wants to challenge your data, I'd be interested to know where they get anything 'more accurate' from. If there is a standard source out there, I presume it won't be long before it comes out in the open.
Those are only my thoughts. But if you can understand your demographic profile, you'll be able to make these kind of informed judgements.
Adam