Plans and Strategies

In late 2005 the Welsh Assembly Government accepted a proposal to reduce the number of local plans and strategies that local government have to produce from dozens to just four. This reduction process was called "plan rationalisation" and its aim has been to lessen the administrative burden placed on local councils and to enable them to focus on delivery to the citizen rather than on complying with processes set out by the Welsh Assembly Government.

The four strategies

Plan rationalisation has resulted in the requirement of just four statutory, high level strategies in each local authority:

• Community Strategy - being the over-arching document with 3 prescribed strategies below

• Children and Young People’s Plan

• Health, Social Care and Well-being Strategy

• Local Development Plan

The development of these four plans and strategies has meant that previous plans and strategies with which people have been familiar have been subsumed into, or aligned with, these four new statutory plans in some way. Just because there are now only four statutory plans, it does not mean that planning in other areas has stopped - it simply means that local authorities can now choose how to meet and monitor their strategic and operational goals. They may choose to continue to develop their own plans beneath the "big four", or maintain previous planning arrangements and simply align them with the four new plans, or have no other plans and just ensure that all the issues are addressed through the four statutory plans. Whatever they choose to do (and all local authorities work in different ways), all of the issues should somehow be covered in the four strategies.

This information attempts to explain what the new strategies cover, what they have subsumed from the old planning regime and how other continuing planning processes fit in with this. Some local level plans will cut across one or more of the new statutory plans, whereas others will be clearly bedded into just one. However, we are still in a transitional period for concluding some of the plans and strategies and the planning processes will be working differently across the 22 local authority areas in Wales. Please view this information as an indicative guide only and talk to your local authority or County Voluntary Council (CVC) for more detail about how this is working in your area.