PPG17 Open Space Assessment: How It Worked

A PPG17 open space assessment worked by measuring three things at once: how much open space a district had, what condition it was in, and what it was worth to the people who used it. The method came from Planning Policy Guidance 17, the English guidance that governed open space, sport and recreation from 2002 until the National Planning Policy Framework replaced it in 2012. Councils commissioned the work to build an evidence base for their local plans, and consultants carried it out parish by parish, site by site.

How a PPG17 open space assessment worked

The assessment began with an audit. Every parcel of open space in the district was identified, typed and measured: parks and gardens, natural and semi-natural green space, amenity green space, provision for children and young people, outdoor sports facilities, allotments, cemeteries, and civic spaces. Typology mattered because PPG17 attached different standards to different kinds of space. A playing field and a village green were not interchangeable, and the audit recorded them separately.

Each site was then visited and scored. Assessors recorded condition, access, facilities and, in the fuller versions of the method, a quality score and a value score kept deliberately apart. A scruffy but well-loved kickabout area could score low on quality and high on value. The distinction was the point: it stopped a tidy but unused site from outranking a worn one that a neighbourhood actually depended on.

The third layer was consultation. Household surveys, school surveys, user counts and stakeholder workshops fed into the value scores. The guidance expected councils to ask residents what they used and what they lacked, not simply to count hectares. A district could be well supplied on paper and still short of play space in the two wards where children lived.

Firms that ran this work kept the method visible in their service pages. Ashley Godfrey Associates, a planning and leisure consultancy based in Ware, Hertfordshire, described audits of provision, structured consultation and mapping among its methods, and its archived pages set out how a PPG17 open space assessment moved from site survey to strategy. The firm traded from 2007 to 2019 and closed when its principal retired, so its pages survive as an archive rather than a live practice.

Surveys and audits of local provision

The audit produced a spreadsheet before it produced a strategy. For each site: name, address, typology, ownership, size in hectares, access arrangements, quality score, value score. For each settlement: total provision, provision per thousand residents, and the distance from housing to the nearest site of each type.

Provision standards were then set locally. PPG17 did not impose national hectare targets; it asked each authority to derive its own, usually as a quantity standard, a quality standard and an accessibility standard. A common shape was a certain number of hectares of parks per thousand people, a minimum quality score for new provision, and a walking distance threshold, often 300 metres to a small local space and 1,000 metres to a larger one.

The gap analysis compared what existed with what the standards required. That comparison, not the raw totals, drove the recommendations: where to protect, where to improve, where to require new provision through planning obligations, and where to allow a loss only if a better site replaced it.

Playing pitches were audited on a separate track. A playing pitch strategy counted pitches, measured their condition and drainage, and modelled demand from clubs and schools against supply. The two exercises met in the local plan evidence base, where open space and pitch findings were read together.

Mapping open space and catchments

Mapping turned the audit into a picture a committee could read. Sites were drawn as polygons on an Ordnance Survey base, coloured by typology, with ownership boundaries overlaid. The map showed at a glance where green space clustered and where it did not.

Catchments were drawn around each site, usually as straight-line buffers at the accessibility distances the standards had set. A 300 metre buffer around a play area, a 1,000 metre buffer around a park. Overlaying those buffers on housing density revealed which streets fell outside every catchment, and those gaps became the priority list.

Straight-line buffers were a known simplification. They ignore a railway line, a river or a dual carriageway that makes a short walk long. Better assessments added barriers to the map or used network distances along footpaths, and the reports said which method they had used. The honesty about method is what makes the older studies still readable.

Heritage mapping appeared in some commissions as a parallel layer: listed buildings, conservation areas and historic parkland recorded alongside modern provision, so that a strategy did not recommend improvements that would damage a registered landscape.

What replaced PPG17?

The National Planning Policy Framework, published in 2012, withdrew the PPG17 guidance and folded its concerns into a broader policy on health, wellbeing and social interaction. The typology and the local standards did not vanish. Councils kept using their assessments, and the underlying questions, how much, how good, how close, stayed the same.

What changed was the vocabulary. Open space strategies now sit alongside green infrastructure plans, biodiversity net gain and active travel policies. The evidence base is expected to serve more purposes at once. An audit built for PPG17 often still does that work, provided the data is refreshed.

Who did this work in England?

Local authority leisure and planning teams commissioned it, sometimes jointly, sometimes through a consultant. The archived record names the councils: Erewash Borough Council, the London Borough of Harrow, Medway Council, Mid Bedfordshire District Council, Cambridge City Council, South Gloucestershire, Thurrock, Haringey, and the Nene Park Trust.

Sector bodies shaped the method. Fields in Trust, formerly the National Playing Fields Association, published benchmark standards for outdoor play and sport that many authorities used as a starting point. Play England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport worked on play performance indicators. CABE Space acted as a strategic enabler for the Children's Play programme. The advisory group behind the publication Planning for Play included practitioners from this field.

Named officers from the period appear in archived testimonials: Alistair Wilson at Cambridge, Peter Barron at Harrow, Dave Brown at Erewash, Clare Nelmes at South Gloucestershire, Grant Greatrex at Thurrock. Those are records of the time, quoted as archives, not endorsements now.

Why the old assessments still matter

A PPG17 assessment is a snapshot with a date on it. Read one from 2008 and you can see what a district counted, how it scored quality, where it drew its catchments and what it recommended. Compare it with the current open space strategy and you can see what was built, what was lost and what was quietly dropped.

For anyone writing a new strategy, the old documents are a free methods manual. The typology, the split between quality and value, the local standards and the catchment maps are all reusable. The main caution is data age: population has moved, sites have changed hands, and a standard set for one growth scenario may not fit the next.

The practical advice is to keep the audit layer alive. Site boundaries, typology and condition scores can be maintained between full assessments, so that the next strategy starts from a current map rather than a decade-old survey.

Why this belongs in the atlas

Regional names, grape names, and annual reports answer different questions. Read the regional reference alongside the Zinfandel field guide and the Cordon Creek archive to keep those layers connected without collapsing them into one claim.

For source details and known limits, consult the references in the rail. The first release is intentionally useful at a modest scale: it establishes a dependable route through the public record and leaves room for verified additions.