Neighbourhood Area designation and subsequent Neighbourhood Plan preparatio - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

Neighbourhood plans (as far as I understand) must cover the whole neighbourhood area. As only one plan can be produced for each neighbourhood area excluding an area from a plan would effectivley be excluding it from neighbourhood planning. However policies can be focused on specific areas. If a part of the neighbourhood area doesn't need to be covered by any policies that's fine. There's no requirement for NDPs to be exhaustive and can have as few as one policy. For example there may be a specific part of the neighbourhood area that needs some kind of design code because it has particular character value. There'd be no point applying that policy in areas that don't have special character value, and the requirement for policies to be justified and evidence based would prevent you from doing so anyway. Is the parish sure that residents and businesses in the areas they want to omit don't need/want to get anything out of the plan?

As Dan says the plan could just contain policies for the area you want to cover and be 'silent' on the remaining area. Alternatively you could apply to the Local Planning Authority to amend the Neighbourhood Area to exclude the bit you don't want to cover. There would need to be a standard 6 week consultation on that, but apart from that it shouldn't be too onerous.

The proposed changes to the CIL regs will throw this into sharp focus. If the active parts of the Neighbourhood Plan represent a small area, does the Parish Council get the full 25% CIL. There could be some interesting debates where local town councils for larger settlements which may well be accommodating a lot of development could prepare a token neighbourhood plan which only contained proposals for a small area.

Daniel raises a good point. If you exclude part of the Parish from the Neighbourhood Area/Plan then you won't get the uncapped 25% of any CIL revenues that happen in that excluded area (you'd just get 15% capped at £100 per household). Policies in a Neighbourhood Plan don't have to apply to the whole area - so you could have the policies in the area you want to cover, and let the plan be 'silent' on the remaining areas. However, you'd get access to CIL as these area would still be within the area of an adopted Neighbourhood Plan.

Thank you all for your comments and thoughts on this- all very useful. We have not (yet) had any queries from Parish Councils/ Neighbourhood Forums such as what I outlined- it was just a query that arose from general discussions within our department, but I thought it would be useful to look into this should the question arise in the future.