PAS soundess & legal checklists - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

Hello Ryan We are about to start work on updating the Soundness Self-Assessment Toolkit. The reason we've delayed this is to try and understand if its still used and useful, and so whether it was worth doing. It seems it is. I hope we'll have something to publish within 4-6 weeks. But don't let that stop you from cracking on. Alice

Thanks Alice - will keep an eye out for it. Is there any intention to update the legal checklist too? Appreciate this is probably more complex given changes to regs in recent times.

Ryan, yes we will be updating that as well, particularly now the regulations have been consolidated.

Just to clarify. We don't have any legal checklists. Anything we produce is just from us, with no formal weight. We have 2 self assessment tools for plan-making. Firstly, the Soundness Self-Assessment Toolkit, which is quite process based and concentrates on meeting the soundness tests. It is quite old but certainly has been widely used, and use of it was strongly encouraged in the past by PINs. This is quite out of date now, but it seems as though it is still useful (if up to date). So we're going to update it, hopefully to be made public in around 4-6 weeks. Secondly, we have our NPPF checklist. Again, not a legal thing, just our thoughts. This looks at the new policy aspects as expressed in the NPPF and should be a help for you to self-assess your existing or emerging policies against national policy, to give you a view about how compatible they are with the NPPF, and therefore understand if you need to do anything to fix any policies. This should be up to date. We are considering a review in the light of some responses we've received about it. We're also looking to see if the 2 checklists can be combined, or if they are better off as separate things.

Thanks Andrea. We will certainly take that on board. If anyone else has any general comments like that, please do post them here. I think we intend at this stage to keep the 'soundness tool' and 'legal compliance tool' as separate things, but will be updating both.

Can I ask PAS if there is any update on the timescales for updating the soundness and legal compliance tools please?