How a PPG17 open space assessment worked

How did a PPG17 open space assessment actually work in practice?

In practice the work ran in stages. The first was an audit: every parcel of open space in the district was listed, classified and visited. PPG17 grouped provision into types, from parks and gardens through natural and semi-natural green space, amenity green space, provision for children and young people, to outdoor sports facilities, allotments, cemeteries and civic spaces. Each site was recorded with its size, access, condition and the facilities on it, so the audit produced a site-by-site picture rather than a headline figure.

The second stage was assessment. The audit data was compared with the amount of provision the district had, the quality of what existed, and how far residents had to travel to reach it. That comparison is where the consultancy work sat, and it is the part that later fed the strategy. Ashley Godfrey Associates, a Hertfordshire planning and leisure consultancy based in Ware and active from 2007 to 2019, described this kind of provision audit and structured consultation among its services, and its archived casework includes a PPG17 open space assessment for the London Borough of Harrow. The firm closed when its principal retired; the method it used is still legible in the archived pages.

The third stage was consultation, and the fourth was the strategy itself: a document setting local standards, identifying gaps and surpluses, and giving the council a basis for planning obligations and future investment.

Who carried out the surveys, and how were the results audited and mapped?

Surveys were normally a joint effort. Council officers supplied the site lists, the local plan context and any existing records. The consultancy supplied the survey method, the fieldworkers and the analysis. Fieldwork meant walking each site, photographing it, noting equipment, surfaces, boundaries and signs of neglect, and recording access points. For playing pitches the survey was more technical: pitch sizes, drainage, changing provision and the number of matches each pitch could carry.

Auditing the results meant checking the field data against the council's own records and against what residents said. A site recorded as poor quality on a visit could be confirmed or challenged in consultation. Discrepancies were revisited. This is why the audit is described as evidence rather than opinion: the same site had to survive a field visit, a map check and a public comment.

Mapping tied the audit to geography. Each site was drawn as a polygon, and catchments were drawn around it. A catchment is the area from which people are expected to travel to a site, and PPG17 practice used distance thresholds rather than a single radius for everything. A small children's play area might be expected within a few hundred metres of homes, while a large park or a sports facility would draw from further away. Overlaying the catchments showed which neighbourhoods sat inside more than one catchment and which sat outside all of them. That gap map, not the raw count of sites, was usually the most useful output for the strategy.

Quality and value were scored separately. Quality covered condition and facilities. Value covered how much the site contributed to the district's aims, which could be high for a modest site in a dense area and lower for a large site nobody could reach. A site can be poor in quality and high in value, and the assessment had to hold both readings at once.

How the evidence reached a council strategy

The assessment only mattered once it changed a document. The usual route was a local standards paper: the council adopted minimum amounts of provision per thousand residents, distance thresholds for different types of space, and quality expectations. Those standards then appeared in the local plan or in supplementary guidance, and from there in planning decisions. A developer proposing housing on a site with no accessible play space within the threshold could be asked to provide it, because the standard and the gap map said so.

The evidence also shaped capital programmes. If the audit showed three play areas in one ward and none in another, the strategy could rank replacement and improvement work accordingly. Playing pitch strategies worked the same way, using the pitch survey to show whether a district had too few or too many pitches of a given type, and whether the shortfall was in quantity or in quality.

Consultation results were reported alongside the technical findings, so a strategy could say both that provision fell below the standard and that residents named the same sites as the ones they used and valued. That combination is harder to dismiss than either part alone.

What the transition to the NPPF changed

PPG17 was cancelled in 2012 when the National Planning Policy Framework took effect. The NPPF kept the idea that planning should be evidence-based and that open space and recreation matter, but it did not prescribe the same assessment method. Councils moved to local standards, playing pitch strategies and open space strategies under the new framework, often reusing the audit data gathered under PPG17.

What survived is the logic: count what exists, judge its quality and value, map who can reach it, consult the people who use it, then set a standard the council can apply. The vocabulary changed more than the practice did.

What a reader should take from the method

Three habits from PPG17 practice remain useful to anyone reading or commissioning an open space study. First, separate quantity from quality and value; a district can have enough sites and still fail residents because the sites are in the wrong places or in poor condition. Second, map catchments rather than assuming a single distance works for every type of space. Third, keep the audit trail: field notes, photographs, map polygons and consultation responses, because a standard that cannot be traced back to evidence is easy to overturn.

For councils, students and junior consultants working through old evidence bases, the archived material from the PPG17 era is worth reading as a record of how the method was applied, including the Harrow open space study and the Nene Park Trust play trail casework. The firms that did the work have mostly gone, but the documents they produced still show how a survey became a strategy.