Background to Parish Plans
The Rural White Paper provided communities with a fantastic opportunity to transform their local environment, in the form of a parish plan. The key to the success of the parish plan lies in its local implementation, giving a community the opportunity to interpret and present their output in a diversity of ways.
Communities of any size can produce a parish plan. To date around 3,000 communities have produced a parish plan, either individually or by forming local clusters. These holistic documents comprise the socio-economic and environmental issues of a community and their proposed remedies.
Communities are growing and changing all around us. Most people have strong views on whether this change is for the better or the worse, but unfortunately for the vast majority of individuals this is as far as their involvement will go. Parish plans give everyone in a community the opportunity to influence the development of their surroundings.
Parish plans are intended to be evolving documents, outlining how a community would like to develop over the next ten years, and usually include an action plan detailing how these developments can be achieved.
In July 2007 Defra published their report looking at the integration of parish plans into the wider systems of local government. This report looked at the development of parish plans, the extent to which they are integrated into the local government system, enabling factors that support integration and barriers to integration.
The focus fell into three main categories :
- the success with which parish plans have been integrated into local planning and service delivery procedures
- the key problems that parish plans have faced with regard to integration into community planning
- recommendations covering how problems might be overcome and how to share best practice
While recognising the endeavours of dedicated groups of volunteers, the report highlighted the failure of parish plans to be integrated into the local planning systems.
The executive summary and full report are available for viewing at the Defra webite :
The information and resources contained in the pages of this website seek to provide steering groups with the necessary tools to ensure their plan has the best possible opportunity to be integrated into the wider plans of service providers.