Practical application of codes in decision-making

A design code supports development management officers in dealing with design matters during the determination of planning applications. A code that communicates policy positions unambiguously and is easy to use will help development management officers to apply policy consistently. As a consequence, it will facilitate and speed up negotiations and decision-making.

Another benefit of a code’s clarity (in comparison to design guides) is that it reduces dependence on the judgement of DM officers. This allows senior colleagues to be more efficient with their time and makes it easier for junior officers to develop the confidence to justify their decisions.

Lake District National Park Authority development management officers are already using their design code regularly in compiling reports and in negotiations with applicants, both at pre-app and at the application stage. Applications have been withdrawn and resubmitted as a result.

Reasons for refusals not only referred to their code, but also back to policy. This emphasises the value of unambiguous policy hooks as they make it easier for officers to track back to the parent policy from the design code. As the Lake District team said: “The policy hook still is what the development management team use to justify their decisions. But the design code provides further detailed guidance about what that policy wording means”.

Adopting a new code allows you to “draw a line in the sand”, as Gedling Borough Council put it, marking a boundary between decisions made up to that point and all that follow. This is particularly useful in areas of poor quality or bland development. Adopting a design code allows you to apply new, higher standards, regardless of what was permitted before.

This will only work if applications comply with the design code. How easy it is for development management officers to make this assessment depends on the scope of the code, and to what extent the design code is expressed as unambiguous, binary rules.

You can best define your code’s scope by engaging with development management officers and cross-collaborating with stakeholders. While this produces good insights, not all of them will be directly relevant to your code, with the risk that you widen the scope and lose sight of your core objectives. If this happens, implementing your code is likely to be more difficult. As a general rule, the narrower your code’s scope, the more likely that the code’s requirements can be expressed in unambiguous rules.

At Gedling Borough Council, for example, the code’s objectives were not only clearly aligned to three of the local authority’s corporate priorities – ‘Characterful Gedling’,

‘Greener Gedling’ and ‘Connected and Healthy Gedling’– but also closely mapped to national and local planning policies.

To be effective, though, the code had to be useable and, as far as possible, easily managed by the LPA. This meant narrowing its scope to objectives that address the Borough’s most prominent issues, such as the wide variety of local character areas and to formalise minimum distances between properties; and building types, such as alterations and extensions, and small sites and large sites, reflecting the high proportion of applications received in these categories.

The project was led by the LPA’s policy team, who were writing a brief for external consultants to develop the code. Aware that neither they nor their consultants had day-to-day experience of negotiating planning applications, the policy team instituted a system of checks to ensure that the code stayed true to its mission. Early versions of the code were passed to development management officers, who tested their usefulness and value against former planning applications.

“The policy hook still is what the development management team use to justify their decisions. But the design code provides further detailed guidance about what that policy wording means.”

Lake District

While it helps to set requirements in design codes as straightforward yes–no options, it is not possible to impose that rigour in every instance. Retaining flexibility in some respects, for example to enable development proposals to go beyond the requirements of the code, is therefore important. However, since part of the rationale for design codes is to reduce reliance on professional judgements in assessing compliance, you should aim to minimise the scope of this flexibility to make the code less open to interpretation. Where there is a risk that flexibility will lead to ambiguous assessments, you need a way to resolve the uncertainty.

Medway Council Pathfinder team addressed this by developing a ‘code breaking’ policy regarding exemplary design, which is defined in the adopted SPD design code. Where a proposal does not meet parts of their code, or addresses policy matters in an alternative way, the proposal must undertake a considered and successful process through the Council’s preferred Design Review Panel. Utilising a traffic light system, the review panel then makes a judgement on whether the proposal demonstrates exemplary design by breaking identified coding requirements. If the proposal includes sections marked in red, it will be automatically rejected and requires additional reviews. All sections marked green will garner support while sections marked in amber, require a nuanced response to determine whether code breaking is permissible.

Even if an application is assessed as compliant with the design code, the findings need to be weighed in the light of other policies and material considerations before permission can be granted or refused. The code supports an objective assessment of the design aspects of a proposal by setting out clear, preferably unambiguous rules that achieve policy objectives. This often improves development management officers’ confidence in taking design matters into account and giving them sufficient weight, to balance against other policies and material considerations.

The sheer variety of possible applications makes it difficult for your code to work as you expect in every instance. It should nonetheless raise the design quality of development.

Embedding codes in day-to-day practice

Successful implementation requires you to bring your development management colleagues up to speed on using the design code and thereafter embedding it into their day-to-day practice.

This is not the work of a single person or team, but it does need positive management and engagement to ensure codes help design become a core part of planning by integrating high quality into everyday practice. As the Gedling Borough Council Pathfinder team said, the objective is “to embed your code in the planning application process” rather than keeping design assessment as a separate isolated exercise.

Integrating your code into daily practice involves allocating appropriate resources, ensuring cross-collaboration with other departments and outside agencies, prioritising development management time for useability testing, and integrating monitoring with other plan monitoring activities. Furthermore, successfully embedding codes in practice also relies on a number of things:

1. Training

Training is a critical phase in implementing your code. As well as explaining how the code works and the processes for monitoring, you need to communicate arrangements for transitioning to it in dayto-day practice. This is also an opportunity to explain the code’s status, the weight of its requirements, and how to balance them against the other pertinent matters in decision-making.

Training should be carefully planned for maximum benefit. As well as ensuring that it is properly resourced, you should think carefully about the best people to deliver it. There are many options – development management officers, members of the policy team, in-house specialists, or even an external consultant. The point is to choose people who have an in-depth understanding of the legislative and corporate context as well as the detail of the code and any operational issues. For more information, see ‘Writing for the reader’ and ‘From policy to practice’.

You might also consider written guidance or videos that can be accessed outside of training sessions. The Pathfinders all took different approaches tailored to their local circumstances.

2. Promotion

An important ingredient of implementation success is to advertise and promote your code to applicants.

At the very least, applicants should be made aware of your design code before they apply. Well-targeted information will allow them to take account of its requirements in a timely way, avoiding wasted time and resource.

Timely promotion communicates the code’s numerous benefits in terms of clarity and speed of decision-making, both of which are likely to be important for applicants. The more applicants know and understand, the smoother the implementation process.

On the Gedling Borough Council project, their website will be a critical tool in promoting the Design Code and consideration is being given as to how best to ensure that applicants are directed to information on the Design Code before they are able to submit a planning application.

And Gedling are also seeing that the design code can be used more widely to promote the value of good design. The team’s promotional efforts extend to maximising the influence of their design code. Their view is that the spirit of the design code should be in all development regardless of whether the local planning authority has any control over it, even on permitted development. Making the point that, “It’s the extensions in your street that bother people the most”, their innovative message is that adherence to the code has the potential to not only promotes neighbourhood harmony but improves design and boosts the value of property, too.

3. Checklists

Many of the Pathfinders, including Medway Council, are using checklists to help embed the practice of the code across everyone involved, from applicants to registration and development management (DM) officers, and extending to the preparation of the code itself.

Checklists can be used in the registration and validation process. By requiring an applicant to complete a checklist before an application can be registered, it ensures that applicants are aware of the code. Over time, as agents become familiar with the process and requirements, applications should become more compliant, reducing bureaucracy and speeding up the decisionmaking process. Completing the checklist is a requirement for the registration and validation of planning applications.

Checklists can also be used by DM officers in their decision-making process. However, even if the checklist submitted by the applicant indicates that the scheme is codecompliant, it is still essential for the DM officer to provide independent confirmation and analysis. If the code is written as unambiguous rules, a checklist offers a simple tick-box route to approval for a DM officer. However, in other situations, the quality of synthesis, outcomes, and other judgments must still be considered before approval can be granted.

Checklists can also play a role in checking the code’s clarity during its preparation. For example, the Lake District National Park Authority Pathfinder team found that its checklist was “quite long and ambiguous in places,” resulting in development management officers not using it. As mentioned earlier, this has been noted as a lesson learned, with a plan to improve the code’s clarity in future revisions.

This piece was written in collaboration with Penelope Tollitt, who has broad experience in local plans, urban regeneration, and master planning. She runs the consultancy Making Places Together, working with public, private, and third sector clients to achieve quality sustainable development. Penelope Tollitt – Design Council.