Public unlikely to get involved in neighbourhood planning, claims survey

More than two-thirds of people (70%) say they would be unlikely to get involved in neighbourhood planning, research commissioned by the National Trust has claimed.

The charity warned that this prospective inactivity would “leave the door open to vested interests with a pro-development agenda”. Neighbourhood planning is the government’s proposed method for ensuring community involvement in planning decisions.

The research also suggested that public awareness of the government’s planning reforms was low, with 73% of respondents saying that they had heard either not very much or nothing at all about the changes.

Fiona Reynolds, Director-General of the National Trust, said: “We strongly welcome attempts to engage local communities in the planning process – but to undermine these efforts with a planning framework that favours development for short term financial profit is fundamentally misguided.

“The only voice that communities are being given is the voice to say yes to development. What communities really want may go out of the window in the face of a default yes.”

The charity has been campaigning vociferously against the government’s reforms, and the presumption in favour of sustainable development in the National Planning Policy Framework in particular.

In July the National Trust argued that the changes would lead to “unchecked and damaging development in the undesignated countryside on a scale not seen since the 1930s”.

The NPPF cuts the amount of planning policy from more than 1,000 pages to under 100 and is part of ministers’ efforts to simplify and streamline the planning system.

Local government minister Bob Neill was subsequently quoted in the Sunday Telegraph as saying that the criticisms of the reforms were “a carefully choreographed smear campaign by left-wingers based within the national headquarters of pressure groups”.