• Building
  Community
  • Introduction
  • Building Community Consortium
  • Suggestions
• Neighbourhood planning
  • Introduction
  • Localism Act
  • Plans and Policy
  • Frontrunners
  • Websites
  • Publications
  • Process
• Low Carbon Communities
  • Introduction
  • What and how
  • Green Deal
  • Funding
  • Pioneers
  • Websites
  • Publications
  • On this site

 

A guide to the community-led Neighbourhood Plans introduced by the UK Government’s Localism Act 2011

Neighbourhood Plans - introduction

The Localism Act 2011 is vital to the delivery of the government’s Big Society agenda which aims to shift power from central government to the local level. This decentralisation policy will provide new rights and powers for community groups and voluntary organisations to:

• Get involved in the running of local public services;
• More effectively hold their local authority to account through referenda;
• Have much more influence on planning and housing development in their neighbourhoods.

The Act’s key proposals will alter the policy landscape of community planning by introducing Neighbourhood Plans as a new tier in the statutory planning system and providing a series of mechanisms to enable communities to implement their plans, together with a requirement on developers to consult communities before submitting their applications for planning permission.