PPG17 Open Space Assessment in Practice

A PPG17 open space assessment proceeded in three stages. Field surveyors recorded every open space parcel and its facilities on a standard form, the parcels were mapped with their catchments, and the resulting numbers were converted into provision standards expressed as hectares per 1,000 population and as a distance threshold. The published record of one consultancy that ran this sequence between 2007 and 2019, Ashley Godfrey Associates of Ware in Hertfordshire, shows the method as a working routine rather than a single report.

How did a PPG17 open space assessment work in practice?

In practice the assessment was a sequence of documents, not one event. A local authority commissioned a study; the consultant assembled an evidence base; the evidence base produced standards; the standards were written into the local development framework. The PPG17 open space assessment carried out by Ashley Godfrey Associates for the London Borough of Harrow is one archived example of the sequence, and the firm's service pages describe the same order of work for other councils: audit first, then consultation, then standards, then policy review.

The order matters because each stage constrains the next. An audit that misses a parcel produces a standard that under-provides for the population it is meant to serve. A consultation that asks the wrong question produces a standard nobody will defend at examination. The published guidance that governed the work was Planning Policy Guidance 17, issued by the Department for Communities and Local Government and later replaced by the National Planning Policy Framework. PPG17 set the categories of open space and required an assessment of need, but it did not prescribe a single method, so each study had to state its own.

A typical commission ran for several months. Officers supplied the existing local plan, the housing trajectory and any earlier leisure strategies. The consultant added the audit, the mapping and the consultation record. The output was a report with an appendix of parcel data and a set of recommended standards. The council then adopted the standards as supplementary planning guidance or as a policy in its development plan document.

What did the surveys and audits of local provision measure?

The survey measured the physical facts of each parcel. A field form recorded the site boundary, the area in hectares, the typology under PPG17, the facilities present, the condition of those facilities, and the access arrangements. Typologies in common use included parks and gardens, natural and semi-natural green space, amenity green space, provision for children and young people, outdoor sports facilities, allotments, cemeteries and churchyards, and civic spaces.

Condition and value were scored separately. A site could be in poor condition but carry high value because of its location or its use. The quality and value matrix used in several studies of the period, including work associated with Haki Kapasi, treated the two scores as independent axes. A site in good condition with low value might be a candidate for disposal or for a change of use. A site in poor condition with high value was a candidate for investment.

Quantity was counted against population. The audit divided the total hectares of each typology by the population of the relevant area and expressed the result as hectares per 1,000 people. That figure could then be compared with national benchmarks. Fields in Trust, formerly the National Playing Fields Association, publishes benchmarks for outdoor sport and children's play, and those published figures were the usual external reference. The audit did not invent its own national comparator.

Access was measured as distance. For each typology the survey recorded how far a household had to travel to reach a site of that type. The distances were tested against the settlement pattern rather than applied uniformly, because a rural ward and an inner urban ward do not share the same walking geography.

How were open space and its catchments mapped?

Mapping began with the parcel. Each audited site was drawn as a polygon on a base map, usually at a scale fine enough to show footpaths and site entrances. The polygon carried an identifier that matched the survey form, so the map and the data table referred to the same object. Without that link the audit becomes a list of sites with no spatial meaning.

Catchments were drawn as buffers around each site, with the buffer distance taken from the access standard for that typology. A catchment for a children's play area was small, often a few hundred metres. A catchment for a large park or a natural green space was larger. The buffers were then intersected with the housing stock, which produced a simple and defensible statement: this many dwellings lie within the access threshold of a site of this type, and these dwellings do not.

Gaps emerged from that intersection. A gap was not automatically a deficiency, because a settlement might be served by a site of a different typology or by a site just outside the drawn boundary. The mapping stage therefore produced a list of candidate deficiency areas for the consultation stage to test.

Heritage mapping used the same discipline for a different purpose. Designated heritage assets, conservation areas and listed structures were plotted against the open space layer so that the assessment could show where green space and heritage overlapped. The Bury Mount study at Towcester and the Nene Park Trust Play Trail are two archived examples of site-specific work in the same mapping tradition.

What provision standards follow from the audit and the mapping?

Standards came in three forms. A quantity standard set a target in hectares per 1,000 population for each typology. An access standard set a maximum distance from a dwelling to a site of that type. A quality standard set the condition a site should reach, sometimes expressed as a score on the audit matrix.

The standards were not national figures applied locally. They were local figures derived from the local audit, then tested against the published benchmarks and against the consultation responses. A council with a dense urban core and a large rural hinterland often adopted different access standards for the two areas, because a single distance would have been either unachievable in the core or meaningless in the countryside.

Adoption was the final step. The standards entered the development plan as a policy or as supplementary guidance, and from that point they were used to test planning applications. An application that removed open space had to show how the loss would be replaced against the standard. An application for new housing had to show how the new population would be served.

The evidence base also had a second life. Playing pitch strategies used the same audit data to calculate team demand and pitch capacity. Performance indicators for play, developed in work with Play England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, used the same site records to report condition and use over time. The assessment was therefore not a one-off document but the first entry in a dataset that a council could maintain.

What changed when PPG17 gave way to the NPPF?

The National Planning Policy Framework replaced PPG17 in 2012 and folded open space into a broader policy on health, wellbeing and social interaction. The assessment method survived the change. Councils still audit provision, still map catchments, still adopt local standards, because the framework requires an evidence base for any policy that restricts development or allocates land.

The vocabulary shifted. Later studies speak of green infrastructure, of accessibility, of multifunctional green space. The underlying sequence of survey, map and standard remains the same, and the archived reports of the 2007 to 2019 period remain a usable description of how that sequence was carried out in practice.

Sources of the figures on this page

• Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, United Kingdom, National Planning Policy Framework, the guidance collection, read 16 September 2026. The open space, sport and recreation policies that a local provision assessment is written against.