PPG17 Open Space Assessment: The Record

A PPG17 open space assessment was a structured study of what open space a local area had, what condition it was in, and how far it was from the people meant to use it. It combined a desk review of policy and mapping with field survey work, then converted the findings into provision standards a council could apply to new development. The record of how one consultancy ran that work between 2007 and 2019 survives in the archived pages of Ashley Godfrey Associates, and it is more useful to a reader planning ground of their own than any current sales page, because it shows the method rather than the pitch.

What a PPG17 open space assessment actually measured

Planning Policy Guidance 17, issued by the UK government and later superseded by the National Planning Policy Framework, asked local authorities to base open space policy on a robust and up-to-date assessment of need. In practice that meant three linked outputs. The first was an audit: every parcel of open space in a district, typed by function, whether parks and gardens, natural and semi-natural green space, amenity green space, provision for children and young people, outdoor sports facilities, allotments, cemeteries, or civic spaces. The second was a quality and value judgement on each site, usually scored against a fixed matrix so that a tired kickabout area and a well-kept town park could be compared on the same scale. The third was a set of provision standards, expressed as a quantity per thousand population, a distance threshold, and a quality expectation.

The archived service pages of PPG17 open space assessment describe exactly this sequence: audits of provision, structured consultation, mapping, and critical review of existing policy. The Harrow Open Space Study is one of the case studies named on the site, and it follows the pattern above rather than inventing a new one. For a homeowner or small landholder the lesson is transferable at a smaller scale: list what you have, judge it honestly, decide what standard you are aiming for, and only then design.

How did surveys and audits of local provision work?

An audit began with a list. Officers supplied their own asset registers, and the assessment team cross-checked them against Ordnance Survey mapping, aerial photography, and site visits. Parcels were drawn as polygons, given a unique reference, and typed. Anything under a minimum size, often around 0.2 hectares for amenity green space, was recorded but treated differently from larger sites, because small scraps of grass rarely function as destinations.

The survey stage was physical. Assessors walked each site with a scoring sheet covering accessibility, entrances, paths, seating, litter, dog fouling, play equipment condition, planting, and vandalism. Quality scores were usually banded, for example poor, fair, good, and very good, and the bands had to be defined before the fieldwork started, not after. Value was scored separately from quality, because a scruffy site in a dense neighbourhood with no alternative within walking distance can carry more value than a pristine site surrounded by other provision. That distinction between quality and value is the part most often lost when the method is summarised, and it is the part that changes the recommendation.

Consultation ran alongside the survey. The archived pages describe structured consultation as a service in its own right, and the clients named on the site, among them Erewash Borough Council, Medway Council, Mid Bedfordshire District Council, Cambridge City Council, South Gloucestershire, Thurrock, Haringey, and the London Borough of Harrow, are all local authorities with a statutory interest in the result. Consultation typically combined household surveys, school and youth workshops, and user group meetings, so that the audit could be tested against what residents said they used and wanted.

Mapping open space and catchments

Mapping turned the audit into a spatial argument. Each site polygon was buffered by the distance standard being tested, commonly 300 metres for children's play, 400 metres for amenity green space, and 600 to 800 metres for larger parks, and the buffers were overlaid on housing. Areas inside a buffer were counted as served; areas outside were counted as gaps. Deprivation data, population density, and barriers such as railways, rivers, and major roads were then used to test whether a straight-line buffer told the truth. A footpath network or a pedestrian crossing can make a site effectively closer than its radius suggests, and a dual carriageway can make it effectively further away.

Heritage mapping was a related task, recorded on the site as a service, and it mattered because historic parkland, registered gardens, and archaeological remains constrain what can be changed. Catchment mapping also fed the playing pitch work, where a pitch strategy has to show not just how many pitches exist but how many teams can be accommodated on them at peak times. Fields in Trust, formerly the National Playing Fields Association, publishes the benchmark figures that these strategies commonly reference, and the site records work with Fields in Trust on national benchmarks for play space.

What happened to the PPG17 approach after 2012?

PPG17 was replaced when the National Planning Policy Framework took effect in 2012, but the assessment method did not disappear. The NPPF kept the requirement for authorities to plan positively for open space and to base policies on evidence, and most open space studies after 2012 still follow the audit, quality and value, standards, and catchment sequence. What changed was the language and the policy hook, not the fieldwork. The archived site notes the transition from PPG17 to the NPPF as part of its planning practice work, which makes it a useful record of the overlap period rather than a snapshot of one regime.

For a reader planning work on their own ground, the practical carry-over is the discipline of evidence. A planting plan or a play area proposal is stronger when it can point to what already exists nearby, how far away it is, and what standard it fails to meet. That is the same logic a district-level study applies, reduced to a single plot.

Reading the record rather than the pitch

Ashley Godfrey Associates traded from 2 Fanhams Hall Road in Ware, Hertfordshire, for twelve years, and the site closes with a note that Ashley is now retired. The business was dissolved on retirement rather than sold, so there is no successor practice to consult and no current service to buy. What remains is an archive: service descriptions, named clients, and case studies such as the Nene Park Trust Play Trail, Bury Mount in Towcester, and the Harrow Open Space Study. Testimonials on the archived pages are attributed to named officers at Cambridge, Harrow, Erewash, South Gloucestershire, and Thurrock, and they should be read as dated records of that period, not as current endorsements.

The sector work is the part with the longest shelf life. The site records performance indicators for play developed with Play England and the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, membership of the advisory group for Planning for Play, benchmark work with Fields in Trust, and a role as strategic enabler for the Children's Play programme at CABE Space. A quality evaluation tool was developed with Haki Kapasi. None of this is a recommendation, and none of it transfers automatically to a garden. It is simply the documented background to a method that still shapes how open space is counted, scored, and mapped in the UK, and that is the reason to read the archive rather than a brochure.

PPG17 assessments measured open space at the scale of a district, counting provision and mapping catchments, but the same survey habit works on a single plot. A household can walk its ground, note what each part is used for, and keep that note as a record. One published example of that habit is a children’s gardening record, which documents growing with children, garden play and crafts, and family garden care and safety. Read alongside an open space audit, it shows how a formal planning method can be scaled down to a garden.