25 : SUSTAINABLE TRAINING
Sustainable Design Training Programme

This project will provide a "creative workshop" style training programme for local planning authorities on securing sustainable design standards and to use the experience gained to develop guidance on the implementation of sustainable design in planning. The project will also simultaneously test-run the feasibility of using a Sustainable Design Review Panel in the planning determination process.

Knowledge transfer will be achieved through establishing the Sustainable Design Review Panel comprising a carefully selected group of business Fellows, who will critique live development projects as case studies. The advice of this Panel will then be converted into training workshops around these case studies and given to the participating planning authorities.

This project will represent a process of working with a selection of leading-edge local planning authorities, bringing to their disposal expert advice from the academic world, and saying to them "okay, now that you have adopted this pioneering planning guidance on sustainable design and construction, let's work out together how you can best implement it in planning determinations, in order to secure the standards of performance that you are seeking".

This is an area where there is a serious skills gap in the implementation of policy and regulation. In working with those at the coalface of the planning process, who are pushing for higher standards, general guidance will be developed for the wider planning community on how best to secure sustainable design aspirations in all new development.

This, in reality, a specialist piece of work focused at the most critical group of professionals in the current town planning system, where all the good intentions and high aspirations for sustainable communities can flounder if appropriate control mechanisms on new development are not found and satisfactorily implemented.