3 Neighbourhood Plan Delivery and Effectiveness

Delivery of the Plan will be through:

  • Allocation of council and developer resources
  • Planning Agreements between councils and developers
  • Monitoring by Lee Forum and the community
  • Collaboration between councils and the community
  • Ongoing discussions with landowners and service providers

Effectiveness of the Plan.

You can read case studies about the effectiveness of Neighbourhood Plans around the country here.

Many of us are aware that community wishes and planning policies can fall by the wayside in the face of other powerful interests and pressures and it’s reasonable to ask how effective the Plan can be:

  1.  Where a landowner makes a a planning application, council planning officers will check the application against the plan to see if it complies
  2. Where the community wants a project to happen they can use the plan to help to progress this, for example in engaging with stakeholders and applying for funding. Having a project in the plan will not automatically make it happen, but will be a tool that can make it easier to bring about should the community work to do this.
  3. The level of local detail included in neighbourhood plans is greater than included in other plans. Once plans are adopted by councils they help councils to understand and act in the best interests of their communities.
  4. Neighbourhood plans carry legal weight. If plan policies are ignored communities can consider to use of legal reviews (though this can be expensive).
  5. Councils are required to support neighbourhood planning. In Greenwich and Lewisham this is through a dedicated officer and is one means by which the community can sustain productive dialogue with councils over time.
  6. Neighbourhood planning is funded by DCLG, and once the plan is adopted it can be amended over time as and when community aspirations evolve, with further funding.
  7. Neighbourhood forums must be consulted on planning applications, meaning their representations made to uphold the policies of the neighbourhood plan are taken into account in planning decisions.
  8. The effectiveness of the plan will partly depend on the community’s use of it. It will be open to all local people and groups to use, not just Lee Forum. We hope that it will be used as much as possible and collaboration maximised.

What if the community want to change the plan after it is adopted?

The neighbourhood plan can be amended over time by the community. This is usually done by applying for more money from DCLG to gather evidence and consult on specific areas. For example, we ran out of money during the current funding round to do masterplanning for Lee Green town centre so the aspiration to do this in the future is already in the neighbourhood plan. Other aspirations may arise, or existing aspirations many change over time.