The Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) has announced it plans to research the value of planning, to identify the most important outcomes in spatial planning and feasible ways to measure them
In an Invitation to Tender (ITT) , the RTPI highlights that in recent years, the assessment and monitoring of planning in the UK and Ireland has mainly focused on a limited set of mostly process-based outcomes.
The research will explore how local authorities and national governments can go beyond simple metrics, with an aim of producing monitoring toolkits that can be adapted and adopted by local authorities.
Policy officer, Tom Kenny, said: “It is often said about organisations that ‘you are what you measure’. If this is the case then it is not surprising that local authorities with limited resources and a focus on numbers and speed are shifting attention towards facilitating development control at the expense of proactive placemaking.
“The planning system should be assessed on the outcomes it is designed to deliver, such as the social, economic and environmental value of development, to help demonstrate the value of planning in a richer way. This is no easy task but advances in planning technology and the availability of data bring new opportunities to measure a wider set of outcomes.”
The research, which will be funded by the RTPI, the Scottish Government, the Welsh Government, the Irish Government and the Ministry for Housing in England, will build on RTPI’s previous work around the Value of Planning as well as the Scottish Government’s 2018 report Monitoring the Outcomes of Planning.
Applications are welcome from consortiums with a range of expertise and knowledge about different nations. The deadline for proposals is 25 November 2019.
