Planning Democracy
Local plans will be given more weight when decisions are made on applications so that there must be strong reasons to override the plan, providing communities more certainty. The same weight will be given to other types of plan, including neighbourhood plans prepared by local communities and spatial development strategies produced by Mayors or combined authorities.
	The Act requires each local planning authority to prepare one local plan, with the content limited to locally specific matters such as allocating land for development, detailing required infrastructure and setting out principles of good design. General policies on issues that apply in most areas (such as general heritage protection) will be set out nationally and contained in a suite of National Development Management Policies, which will have the same weight as plans so that they are fully taken into account in decisions. Local plans will not be able to repeat these.
	The Act makes several other changes to improve the process for preparing local plans: new powers will enable the introduction of ‘Gateway’ checks so that issues are identified earlier during plan preparation, and allow time periods to be prescribed for different parts of the plan preparation process, enabling delivery of a timebound end-to-end process; digital powers in the Act will allow use of more standardised and reusable data, there will be a new requirement for local planning authorities to produce a consolidated policies map of the full development plan for their area, improving the clarity and transparency of plans; and the ‘duty to cooperate’ contained in existing legislation is being repealed.
	Local planning authorities will have a new power to prepare ‘supplementary plans’, where policies for specific sites or groups of sites need to be prepared quickly (e.g. in response to a new regeneration opportunity), or to set out design codes for a specific site or area or across their whole area.
	The Act will also enable groups of authorities to collaborate to produce a voluntary spatial development strategy, where they wish to provide strategic planning policies for issues that cut across their areas (echoing the powers conferred on some Mayoral combined authorities already).