Planning for Non-Planners

A course that helps people in local authorities to understand the planning system

Improve your understanding of planning

Planning is central to the creation and maintenance of good places. As a result, the local authority planning department contributes much of the work of the organisation, including housing, conservation, economic development, recreation and sport, tourism, transportation, and community development.

Given this important role and regular changes in legislation, the Academy for Sustainable Communities (ASC) and the British Urban Regeneration Association (BURA) have created a two-day programme that helps people from a non-planning background to understand better the English planning system with a view to improving performance within local authorities.

How the course works

Planning for Non-Planners is for local authority officers and managers from non-planning backgrounds who interact with the planning system in their work. Participants from different departments come together to lean more about the main principles of planning. Teaching is based around interactive seminar sessions and group workshops. There are also study tours, which give participants the chance to use this knowledge to assess local development sites from a planning perspective.

The course enables participants to:

Understand how their day-to-day responsibilities are affected by planning issues
Identify how they can engage better with the planning system
Gain a better understanding of how far the planning system can contribute to successful and sustainable regeneration

To make sure the course is as interactive as possible the number of participants is limited to twenty-five.

» more details about the course

Background to the course

The ASC-BURA course is supported by a number of professional and Government bodies, with the steering group comprising the Royal Town Planning Institute, the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment and Planning Aid.

The course was successfully launched in spring 2008 with Kirklees Metropolitan Borough Council in West Yorkshire. The feedback from the course was very encouraging with more than 95% of respondents rating the overall experience as ‘Good' or ‘Very Good'.

Book the course

If you are interested in running Planning for Non-Planners in your local authority, please contact Richard Rose at BURA (British Urban Regeneration Association) on 020 7539 4049 or at richard@bura.org.uk.

Download the leaflet to accompany the course.