Guidance

Office for Place – Our vision and principles

The Office for Place will help shift how the planning system is used, as a shield against the worst to its future role as a champion of the best.

From:
Office for Place
Published
14 February 2023

Applies to England

Pedestrian street flanked by modern brick buildings.

Our vision

  • Catalyse a fundamental change within and across all levels of government, communities and the development, planning and design industries, to support the creation and stewardship of popular, healthy, beautiful and sustainable places.
  • Help neighbourhoods, communities and public servants working on their behalf, to ask for and deliver new places, and manage existing places, to be popular, healthy, beautiful and sustainable.
  • Support public sector planners and the British design and development industries to be the best place makers in the world aided by improving UK and international data on happiness, health, popularity and sustainability.

Our principles

Empirical

  • We research and share evidence on what is popular, healthy, beautiful and sustainable. Using that evidence, we advocate for good practice, with ongoing measuring and reporting.
  • The views of the general public are critical to what we do.
  • We rigorously review and seek to improve our expertise and effectiveness.

Empowering

  • We develop understanding of how neighbourhood communities can best engage with the design code creation.
  • We nurture and facilitate the capacity and training that’s needed to create design codes.
  • We empower neighbourhoods, parishes, communities, civic society and councils.

Flexible and focused

  • We are pragmatic and action-focused.
  • We develop at pace the ability to engage with and support partners seeking to develop design codes and related tools.
  • We help the sector foster and develop new skills and capacity that can be sustained into the future.
  • We focus on key priorities and re-focus when necessary

Networked and national

  • We operate as a small and agile core team, supported by an advisory board, that works with a network of supporting organisations, and which is active throughout England.
  • We will work with a range of independent community, academic and practitioner groups and organisations to advise us and broaden our expertise.

Digital and accessible

  • We support the development of digital tools, platforms and capabilities that are open to all, are appropriate to meet a need, and that will enable more people to take an active part in planning and design.
Published 14 February 2023
Contents