Part 13: General Schedule 7: Plan making Section 15F: Design code for whole area Background
The former provisions of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 required that the person or body which exercises any function under Part 2 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 in relation to local development documents, for the purposes of section 39(2), must (in particular) have regard to the desirability of achieving good design.
	New section 15F introduces a new duty for local planning authorities to prepare a local design code at the spatial scale of their authority area, which will set the design requirements development must follow.
	Local planning authorities will be able to prepare and adopt local design codes as either a supplementary plan or as part of their local plan, giving the design requirements set within them the weight of the development plan in decision making.
	The duty applies to local planning authorities as defined in section 15LF.