Surgeries and seminars bring a personal touch to planning

Planning, 1 August 2008

Planning Aid works with a range of communities to help them influence the planning system as it affects their local area. This has involved an amateur football club, a disability group and residents facing regeneration plans.

Portsmouth City Council was keen to ensure that residents in social housing had the tools to enable them to comment on a major regeneration proposal. Planning Aid South worked with it to deliver an advice surgery to explain planning policies, enforcement procedures and interpreting applications.

Many residents attended and had one-to-one discussions on issues of concern or interest to them. This included help with proposals for a house extension and change of use to a nursery and commenting on planning applications in the area.

A West Midlands Planning Aid Service volunteer was drafted in to help a small amateur football club after residents mounted a legal challenge to stop work to expand facilities at the ground. The club had won permission to add artificial training pitches. It was accepted that this would increase traffic along an road for which the council was not responsible.

The scheme offered improvements, but only to country lane standard rather than the higher standard required for the council to adopt its maintenance. A planning condition had been won by residents that the road should be adopted before work began on the pitches.

After seeking legal opinion on the options open to the club, the volunteer helped it lodge an application to remove the condition and draw up a green travel plan. The application was deferred to allow further talks between residents and the club. After these discussions, the application was finally approved, marking a new atmosphere of co-operation between the two sides.

Yorkshire Planning Aid piloted a fresh approach to helping disability groups in Hull and Rotherham. Acting in partnership with council access officers, a two-day training course was devised focusing on development control issues of most relevance and concern to disabled members of the public.

The sessions included a workshop in which delegates tackled an actual application raising access and disability issues. The course also dealt with policy and the importance of the development plan and local development frameworks.

Tino Hernandez is Planning Aid communications manager.