Right place, right time, right cost

With such considerable housing growth in the UK being called for, the key challenge is to deliver sustainable communities and ensure facilities and services, such as schools and hospitals, are delivered alongside new homes. Quite simply, it is to ensure infrastructure is delivered in the right place, at the right time and for the right cost.

Key issues facing social infrastructure providers are:

• how can the public sector tackle the growing funding gap in delivering social infrastructure?
• how can stakeholders adopt a joined-up approach to planning the future needs of existing and emerging communities?
• how can the public sector adopt a multi-agency approach to delivery, resulting in more effective use of funds and assets and better engagement with the private sector?
• how can the private sector proactively develop their strategies to engage and assist regeneration delivery partners?

A joint consultancy team of EDAW and Bevan Brittan has developed a social infrastructure framework (SIF) approach to address social infrastructure needs as an integral part of planning for sustainable communities. The SIF can clarify the nature and scale of social infrastructure requirements and enable stakeholders to move forward in partnership to make informed decisions on future planning and delivery.

The SIF toolkit addresses five sectors:

• education;
• health and social care;
• libraries and community services;
• recreation and leisure services; and
• emergency and essential services.

The toolkit is a statistical model that combines population modelling assumptions with a list of standards and targets, allowing the end user to quantify future social infrastructure needs of communities. Through database and spatial mapping interfaces the model identifies how these future needs can be met through maximising the efficiency of existing facilities and/or phased delivery of new single-sector, co-located or integrated facilities and services.

The partnership approach ensures key stakeholders and sector service providers are involved in the iterative testing of the toolkit model outputs and recommendations for provision. It explores current arrangements for delivery, best practice and innovation to provide a co-ordinated planning and service sector strategy that can be delivered through existing arrangements as well as new tailored ones.

The SIF has been tested in locations in the London Thames Gateway, including Tower Hamlets’ city fringe, Canning Town and Custom House in Newham and the borough of Barking and Dagenham. It is being tested in other growth locations, including the Norwich policy area, Aldershot and Tunbridge Wells, and is being offered to clients across the country.

The results of the Barking and Dagenham analysis included:

• reviewing NHS LIFT and Building Schools for the Future strategies to provide for multiple service facilities
• a family of asset management strategies for money programmes and site acquisition and disposal plans
• a planning contributions strategy for contributions from new development to be established
• a number of new public/public and public/private mechanisms that allow the public sector to both share in value uplift from new facilities and respond to changing circumstances
• a community-led mechanism to manage facilities and spaces.

Undertaking a project

There are five stages in a SIF project:

• Establishing the characteristics of the population, quantifying the nature of existing social infrastructure and identifying deficits in provision.
• Reviewing social infrastructure policy and plans and auditing the legal delivery landscape.
• Detailed modelling to establish future needs from the existing and new population and their cumulative social infrastructure service and facility needs. These are analysed for the scope for co-location or integration.
• Adapting delivery mechanisms and developing tailored delivery solutions.
• Testing the spatial and delivery solutions with key stakeholders to secure a co-ordinated delivery strategy.

The toolkit involves a detailed evaluation of policies, service and facility provision, different population projection methods within the existing and planned communities and a wide range of national, regional and local standards and targets for social infrastructure provision. In a significant development, estimates are analysed using GIS tools to apply accessibility, choice and quality factors and provide a spatial analysis of future needs and the scope for co-location or integration.

A review of current social infrastructure delivery mechanisms exposes a number of barriers that can militate against co-operation including financial, legal, regulatory, cultural, planning, partnership and private sector.