POLICY BRIEFINGThe rise of community food growing: what role for local planning authorities?

14 April 2014

Andrew Ross, LGiU Associate

Summary• Sustain has published a new report setting out how planners can provide

more spaces for community food growing to help meet local authority strategic objectives

• It follows the government’s recent Planning Practice Guidance (PPG), which requires planners to support people to make healthy choices, including promoting access to healthier food

• The report highlights the range of strategic objectives that community food growing contributes to, and illustrates this with examples of planning policies and decisions, and projects, to show why and how to provide more growing spaces

• Getting elected members to understand the value of community food growing is vital for orientating the planning system to provide more spaces, especially in areas where developers say that viability is marginal

• This briefing will be relevant to elected members, regeneration, public health, community development, sustainability and housing professionals, and planners.

Community food growing and the role of planningWhat is community food growing?On 10 April 2014 Sustain, the Alliance for Better Food and Farming, published Planning Sustainable Cities and Community Food Growing: A guide to using planning policy to meet strategic objectives through community food growing. The report shows how local planning authorities can, and are, developing local policies

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POLICY BRIEFINGon community food growing, and illustrates these with a number of examples from across the UK. The report describes community food growing as:

‘the cultivation of land by groups based on residential estates, faith premises, places of employment, schools or within neighbourhoods.’

This land may be available on a permanent or temporary basis, and is generally derelict or underused before being used to grow food. Examples in the guide include:

• communal land on a housing estate

• waste ground and derelict sites

• land within parks

• land awaiting development

• rooftops

• hospital and school grounds

• allotment plots (although allotments, with their specific statutory status, are not the focus of this report).

Community food growing is also popular: the report notes that there is a shortfall of at least 90,000 allotment sites, and that providing more space for community food growing could help to alleviate this demand.

Why is it important? Sustain’s report is timely: last month the government launched its Planning Practice Guidance (PPG) (see LGiU briefing), which for the first time has a health and wellbeing section that instructs planners to consider opportunities for supporting healthy choices. This includes promoting ‘access to healthier food’ – community food growing spaces are one way that planners can achieve this. The Sustain report reinforces the health and wellbeing benefits of community food growing for people who get involved. These include reducing isolation, improving confidence and self-esteem, and increasing a sense of agency through having some control over the local environment.

The report argues that providing spaces for community food growing can also help to meet a number of other local strategic objectives (the publication accompanies each of these with examples of planning policy from LPAs, and actual projects):

• Sustainability: the NPPF instructs planners to ‘meet the challenge of climate change, flooding and coastal change’ – community food growing can contribute to this by reducing food miles and improving air quality, reducing the urban heat island effect, creating permeable surfaces and harvesting rainwater

© Local Government Information Unit, www.lgiu.org.uk, Third Floor, 251 Pentonville Road, London N1 9NG. Reg. charity 1113495. This briefing is available free of charge to LGiU subscribing members. Members are welcome to circulate internally in full or in part; please credit LGiU as appropriate. You can find us on Twitter at @LGiU

POLICY BRIEFING• Green infrastructure (GI): increasing the amount of GI in cities and towns is a

priority for improving biodiversity, creating distinctive spaces, adapting to climate change, and for educating people about the environment

• Education, skills and enterprise: this includes opportunities via traditional education (such as for schoolchildren), but also through informal learning (for example, more than 1600 people have received training on various aspects of food growing via the Capital Growth network in London, and at least 750 people have progressed to formal training or a job) – some community food growing projects become social enterprises and sell food they grow

• Regeneration and community development: a key aspect of regeneration, especially in deprived areas, is to improve the image of an area, and case studies reinforce the value of community food growing to help achieve this – by providing opportunities for people to get together these projects also support community cohesion and inclusion

• Design and creating attractive places to live: the report cites examples of where community food growing spaces have improved the attractiveness (amenity) of well-designed housing developments.

Raised planter box at a community food growing scheme in Newham

How can planners help to increase community food growing? The report sets out five recommendations for LPAs to increase the opportunities available for local people to grow food:

1. Adopt a strategic policy of support for food growing, both existing and future spaces

2. Use detailed policies to identify opportunities: these include area-based policies, site allocations and neighbourhood plans, and should specify when developments are required to provide space for community food growing

© Local Government Information Unit, www.lgiu.org.uk, Third Floor, 251 Pentonville Road, London N1 9NG. Reg. charity 1113495. This briefing is available free of charge to LGiU subscribing members. Members are welcome to circulate internally in full or in part; please credit LGiU as appropriate. You can find us on Twitter at @LGiU

POLICY BRIEFING3. Develop a local evidence base to inform future policies: this evidence

gathering should focus on areas with the greatest need, and projected future need, for more spaces – involve local community food groups and networks

4. Publish advice notes and supplementary guidance on providing and managing community food growing spaces: these should include examples from other places and cover a range of scenarios so that development management planners, developers and communities understand the different options available

5. Monitor provision in new developments: identify targets that quantify the amount of community food growing in new development so that policies are robust – gather positive stories about growing in the local area that can help to sell the policy to developers and the wider public.

Role of elected membersThe report highlights the importance of getting elected members to see for themselves the value of community food growing projects to achieve corporate objectives (see above), as a way for them to champion the need for more spaces. They also need to understand and support the role of planning to help create these spaces as a part of new development.

The publication includes quotes from councillors who clearly endorse community food growing because of the benefits it brings to the neighbourhoods they represent. For example, Councillor Steve Munby, Cabinet Member for Living Environment and Localism, said:

‘Not only have [local residents] got easy access to green spaces but in some of them they have been growing food which distributed locally… About 19 hectares (47 acres) of grot spots have been cleared, existing open spaces given a makeover or new green spaces created, in the last three years.’

Sustainable Food CitiesSustain, the Soil Association and Food Matters have been awarded funding from the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation to establish Sustainable Food Cities (I sit on the project’s Advisory Group). This is a 3.5 year initiative to develop a Sustainable Food Cities Network through which pioneering cities can develop and share best practice; more than 30 cities and towns from around the UK have signed up already. The project includes funding for posts in 6 cities to help them develop their work further in this area: the successful cities are Belfast, Bournemouth, Cardiff, Liverpool, Newcastle and Stockport.

To help inspire cities (and towns) the network is developing the Sustainable Food Cities Award, which will have three levels – Bronze, Silver and Gold – in recognition of the different levels of achievement.

© Local Government Information Unit, www.lgiu.org.uk, Third Floor, 251 Pentonville Road, London N1 9NG. Reg. charity 1113495. This briefing is available free of charge to LGiU subscribing members. Members are welcome to circulate internally in full or in part; please credit LGiU as appropriate. You can find us on Twitter at @LGiU

POLICY BRIEFINGCommentAlthough there is plenty of interest in community food growing in villages and small towns, this report focuses specifically on cities. In these larger urban areas, access to food – and especially restricting access to unhealthy food – has garnered plenty of debate among regeneration, public health and planning professionals and elected members in recent months. In fact, it’s a topic that gets plenty of coverage in the wider press too (see for example the Daily Telegraph’s profile of the latest research linking higher levels of obesity with the proliferation of takeaways).

While the gentrification of some urban areas has led to the arrival of artisan bakeries and locally sourced food, poorer neighbourhoods have in many cases experienced a narrowing of the range of food that is available. Tim Townshend, Director of Planning and Urban Design at the University of Newcastle, writes in the journal Town and Country Planning [March 2014, subscription only] that:

‘[Poorer neighbourhoods] have experienced unprecedented growth of an unhealthy and in some cases harmful mix of fast-food takeaways and ‘all you can eat’ buffets – selling energy-dense, nutritionally poor food.’

Throughout this debate planning’s role has been cast largely as restricting access to unhealthy food. So it is heartening to read a report that is upbeat about the potential for planning to facilitate access to nutritious food too, and which includes so many examples. Admittedly, planners may argue that the role of the planning system in some of the case studies is marginal. But they show the benefits that community food growing brings, which helps to make the case for more sites to be allocated in future via the development process.

As the report makes clear, this is not just about food. Benefits attributed to community food growing include tackling other aspects of city life that get a bad press, such as higher levels of social isolation, a lack of contact with nature and the number of eyesore derelict sites in some areas.

The new PPG’s advice on access to healthy food is a welcome hook on which to justify community food growing spaces in planning terms. And yet, this sits at odds with the overall thrust of planning advice that puts developer profitability centre-stage. It doesn’t leave much room for negotiation between planners and developers, a situation that is exacerbated in poorer areas. As a report by the Town and Country Planning Association (which I co-authored) put it:

‘Areas of poor health are likely to be areas with marginal development viability. Places that most need investment are least likely to get it through meaningful contributions from new development, especially in areas of low demand and low development value.’

It goes on to highlight the role of the public sector to champion the value of investing in projects that improve health and wellbeing, and to educate developers about the value of providing spaces that residents want, and arguably need.

© Local Government Information Unit, www.lgiu.org.uk, Third Floor, 251 Pentonville Road, London N1 9NG. Reg. charity 1113495. This briefing is available free of charge to LGiU subscribing members. Members are welcome to circulate internally in full or in part; please credit LGiU as appropriate. You can find us on Twitter at @LGiU

POLICY BRIEFINGCouncillors, as representatives of local neighbourhoods and potentially as members of planning committees, have an influential role to make this happen. This is cogently summarised by Cllr Phelim Mac Cafferty, Chair of Brighton’s Planning Committee:

‘We have been awarded ‘Healthy City’ status in recognition of our commitment to reduce health inequalities. We believe that locally grown food has a crucial role to play. Today in Brighton and Hove spaces for food growing in new developments are being secured because of our ground-breaking planning policies and guidance.’

Sustainable Food Cities, in partnership with a number of other organisations, has organised Food City Region: Cultivating Planning, a conference in Bristol on 6 May. The event is targeted at planners and others with an interest in the role of the planning system to improve access to healthy food. Follow the hashtag #BFCTalks on Twitter.

For more information about this, or any other LGiU member briefing, please contact Janet Sillett, Briefings Manager, on janet.sillett@lgiu.org.uk

© Local Government Information Unit, www.lgiu.org.uk, Third Floor, 251 Pentonville Road, London N1 9NG. Reg. charity 1113495. This briefing is available free of charge to LGiU subscribing members. Members are welcome to circulate internally in full or in part; please credit LGiU as appropriate. You can find us on Twitter at @LGiU