Laying the groundwork: Ensuring effective design code implementation

Your design code will be more successful if you plan rigorously for its implementation right from the start. This entails identifying all the factors that need to work seamlessly when the different elements of your code come together and are put into practice in making decisions on real planning applications.

Partly, this preparation is about foreseeing the things you need to do during the project. These include three critical topics that are covered in our other materials:

• From policy to practice – engaging constructively with your development management team;

• Bridging siloed working – crosscollaboration with other departments, politicians and other key stakeholders; and

• Writing for the reader – optimising your code’s useability through user testing, careful editing, and clear information design

More fundamentally, though, successful implementation relies on understanding how your design code fits in with the discretionary planning system. We will focus more on this in this section.

Status of design codes

To carry weight in decision-making, codes should be produced as part of a local plan, or as supplementary planning documents (SPDs) or, looking ahead, supplementary plans (SPs). It will be for individual local planning authorities to determine which is the most appropriate approach for them, reflecting local circumstances.

The choice of whether to make your design code part of the local plan or to keep it as an SPD (or, in the future, an SP) is strategic. The Lake District National Park Authority Pathfinder team, for example, favoured speed of production and so naturally chose to adopt their design code as an SPD. The beauty of this, they said, is that they can review and update it flexibly without major interruptions to its use4

While design codes set out in SPDs carry weight in decision-making, they are not themselves policy. Therefore, where design codes are being prepared as SPDs, they should clearly link to ‘policy hooks’ set out in the local plan which provides greater weight in decision-making. Most local plans include design policy to which a code can be supplementary, and an emerging local plan should seek to adopt clear design policies to better suit an existing or future code, including new-style local plans as they come forward.5

4 Further details of the Government’s intentions around plan-making reforms set out in the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 will be published in due course.

5 Under the new plan-making system, where a design code is brought forward as a Supplementary Plan, this will form part of the development plan and serve as policy.

Where SPDs are prepared, clearly identified policy hooks ensure that your design code aligns accurately with policy, making it easier to ensure it is ‘supplementary to’ existing policy, not creating new policy. In other words, the policy sets out the overarching ‘strategy’, and the code is built from this by providing the ‘tactics’ for implementation. As the Lake District National Park Authority Pathfinder team found, having strong policy hooks helped them to assess each of the codes against their policy ‘to make sure that they were all compliant’.

While your design code must be aligned to existing policy, it can also influence the phrasing of policies in an emerging local plan. Knowing the detail of the design code makes it possible to write new policy in a way that strengthens the links between the two documents.

This is exactly what the Medway Council Pathfinder team did. Describing it as “a balancing act”, they were scrupulous in making sure that their emerging local plan contained the right kinds of policy hooks to support their design code.

Since Medway is currently at the Regulation 18 stage of adopting their local plan, they provided descriptive references to policy rather than specific policy quotes to avoid any problems with later adjustments to specific policies within the emerging local plan. However, at the Regulation 19 stage, it is anticipated that these references will become more specific as the Design Code is adopted. View a copy of the code here.