PPG17 Open Space Assessment: How It Worked

How a PPG17 open space assessment worked

The assessment ran as a fixed sequence, and each step fed the next.

First came the typology. PPG17 listed the kinds of open space a council had to consider: parks and gardens, natural and semi-natural greenspace, amenity greenspace, provision for children and young people, outdoor sports facilities, allotments, cemeteries and churchyards, civic spaces, and green corridors. Every site in the district was sorted into one of these categories. A playing field and a village green ended up in different boxes, which mattered later because the standards for each type differ.

Second came the audit. Officers or consultants walked or drove every site, recorded its size, condition, access points and facilities, and noted what was missing. A play area with no seating, a park with no path to the gate, a pitch with drainage problems: all of it went into the record. The audit produced a site-by-site database, usually with photographs and a condition score.

Third came the survey. Residents were asked how far they travelled to open space, which sites they used, what stopped them using others, and what they would change. This was the part that turned a list of sites into a picture of provision. A district can be well supplied on paper and still fail its residents if the sites sit in the wrong places or serve the wrong age groups.

Fourth came the standards. The audit and survey together set local provision standards, expressed as quantity (hectares per 1,000 people), quality (a condition benchmark) and accessibility (a distance threshold, often a walk of a set number of minutes). These standards were the practical output. They gave planners a number to test applications against.

Fifth came the strategy. The assessment ended with recommendations: where to protect, where to improve, where to add. That document then fed the local development framework, and later the local plan.

Surveys and audits of local provision

The audit and the survey answer different questions, and confusing them is the most common mistake in this work.

The audit is supply-side. It records what exists, where, in what condition, and who owns it. It is a physical inventory. A good audit notes ownership and management as well as condition, because a site in poor condition on private land raises different options than one on council land. It also records the type of provision, not just the acreage. Ten hectares of amenity grass is not the same as ten hectares of equipped play.

The survey is demand-side. It captures use, preference and barriers. Standard practice included household surveys by post or online, face-to-face interviews at sites, and focus groups with specific user groups: teenagers, parents of young children, older residents, sports clubs. Schools and clubs often supplied their own data on pitch use.

Two details decide whether the survey is worth anything. The first is sample design. A survey that reaches only the residents who already use the park tells the council nothing about the people who stay away. The second is question wording. Asking residents to rank a list of facilities produces different answers than asking them what would make them use a site more.

The audit and survey are then cross-checked. A site recorded as being in good condition but avoided by residents is a finding in itself. So is a well-used site that the audit scores poorly. The gap between the two is where the strategy usually starts.

Mapping open space and catchments

Mapping turned the audit into a spatial argument.

Each site was plotted with its boundary, its type and its condition. Catchments were then drawn around sites, using the accessibility standard as the radius. A standard of a ten-minute walk becomes a polygon around each site, adjusted for barriers: a river with no bridge, a railway line, a busy road with no crossing. Straight-line buffers overstate access in exactly the places where access is hardest.

The useful map is the overlay. Catchments on top of population density show who is served and who is not. Catchments on top of deprivation data show whether the shortfall falls on the residents with the least private outdoor space. Catchments on top of the audit scores show where a site is reachable but not worth reaching.

Heritage mapping sometimes ran alongside this work. Historic parkland, registered parks and gardens, and old churchyards carry planning constraints that affect what can be changed, so they were recorded in the same exercise rather than discovered later.

Mapping also exposed the difference between provision and access. A district can meet its quantity standard overall and still have wards where no site lies within the walking threshold. The map is what makes that visible to a committee.

What did the assessment actually change?

The output was not a report on a shelf. It was a set of tests that later decisions had to pass.

Planning applications for new housing were checked against the standards. If a development increased the population of a ward beyond the accessibility threshold, the assessment gave the council grounds to seek on-site provision or a financial contribution. If the ward was already well served, the same assessment gave grounds to refuse a poorly located new site.

Capital programmes were ranked by the audit scores. A play area that failed the quality benchmark and sat in a ward with an accessibility gap moved up the list. A site that scored well but had no catchment gap moved down.

Management decisions changed too. Sometimes the finding was that a site should be a different type: an underused kickabout reclassified as amenity greenspace, or a piece of scrub recognised as natural greenspace with a value of its own. PPG17 allowed for that, because it assessed function rather than just land use.

The assessment also fed the evidence base for the local plan. When the National Planning Policy Framework replaced PPG17 in 2012, the underlying logic survived: plan positively for open space, base decisions on robust evidence, and set local standards. Authorities that had done the audit and survey work found the transition easier, because the evidence was already assembled and dated.

What made an assessment hold up?

Three things separated a defensible assessment from a thin one.

Consistency. The same typology, the same condition criteria and the same survey questions applied across the whole district. A site visited in March and a site visited in July can be scored differently if the criteria are loose. Written criteria, applied by trained surveyors, keep the data comparable.

Transparency. The standards had to be traceable to the evidence. A quantity standard pulled from a national figure with no local justification was easy to challenge at examination. A standard derived from the audit, the survey and the accessibility mapping was harder to move.

Currency. Open space data ages. Sites are built on, transferred, improved or neglected. An assessment dated 2007 described a district that no longer existed by 2015. The better practice was to keep the database live and refresh the survey on a cycle, so the strategy rested on current evidence rather than a snapshot.

For anyone reading an old assessment today, the audit method is still worth studying. The policy label changed. The sequence, inventory, consultation, standards, mapping, strategy, did not.