Notebook · August 2026
How PPG17 Open Space Assessments Worked
A plain guide to how PPG17 open space assessments worked: audits of provision, household surveys, mapping catchments, and the passage to the NPPF.
By The Evening Measure editorial desk
A PPG17 open space assessment was a structured study of what open space a local area had, what condition it was in, and how well it served the people living around it. It combined an audit of sites, a survey of residents, and mapping of catchments, and it produced the evidence a council used to set provision standards. The method was published in Planning Policy Guidance 17, in force in England from 2002 until the National Planning Policy Framework replaced it in 2012.
How a PPG17 open space assessment worked
The guidance asked a council to treat open space as a set of distinct types rather than one undifferentiated category. Parks and gardens, natural and semi-natural green space, amenity green space, provision for children and young people, allotments, cemeteries, and outdoor sports facilities each had their own logic. A single site might serve more than one type, and the assessment had to say which.
The work ran in a fixed sequence. First came a desk study of existing policy, strategies, and any earlier studies. Then a site audit, walking or driving every parcel of open space above a size threshold and recording its type, size, access, facilities, and condition. Then a household survey, asking residents which sites they used, how they travelled, and what they thought of them. Then analysis: mapping catchments, comparing provision against local standards, and identifying gaps and surpluses. The output was a report with recommendations, not a decision.
The method was deliberately local. The guidance set no national quantity standard, because a hectare of park in a dense urban ward and a hectare in a rural parish do different work. What it did set was a procedure, and councils that followed it produced evidence that could survive examination at appeal. A worked example of the method in practice, including the audit and survey stages, is described in the archived pages of the PPG17 open space assessment work carried out by Ashley Godfrey Associates between 2007 and 2019.
What did surveys and audits of local provision actually measure?
The audit and the survey answered different questions, and the assessment needed both.
The audit was a physical record. For each site, an assessor noted the primary and secondary typology, the area in hectares, the ownership and management arrangement, the access points, and the facilities present: play equipment, pitches, paths, benches, bins, lighting. Condition was scored against a written scale so that two assessors looking at the same site would reach roughly the same result. Quality and value were often scored separately, because a well-used site of modest quality can matter more than a pristine site nobody visits.
The survey was a sample of households, usually stratified by ward or by distance band from the nearest site. It asked which sites people used, how often, how they got there, how long it took, and what would make them use a site more. It also asked about barriers: road crossings, lighting, dog fouling, anti-social behaviour, the perception of safety. Those answers are what turn a list of sites into a picture of provision.
The two datasets were then read together. A ward might show adequate quantity by hectare but poor access in practice, because the sites sat on the wrong side of a dual carriageway. A parish might show low use of a good site because the survey revealed residents did not know it existed. Neither finding is visible from the audit alone, and neither is visible from the survey alone.
How was open space and its catchments mapped?
Mapping in a PPG17 study was not decorative. It was the analytical step that converted site records into a picture of who could reach what.
Each site was drawn as a polygon, and each type was given a catchment: a distance band within which residents were expected to use it. The bands varied by type. A small children's play area might be expected within a few hundred metres of home, while a large park or a country park might draw from a kilometre or more. The bands were set locally, using the survey evidence where it existed, and stated openly in the report so that a reader could disagree with them.
The catchments were then overlaid on residential areas, usually at output area or similar small-geography level. Areas inside a catchment counted as served; areas outside counted as a gap. Deprivation data, population projections, and the location of planned housing were layered on top, because a gap in an area of new allocation matters more than a gap in a stable low-density area.
The result was a set of maps that a committee could read without a GIS licence: this ward is served for parks but not for play; this parish has quantity but poor quality; this proposed allocation falls outside every catchment for its expected population. Those maps were the part of the assessment most often reproduced in later local plans.
How did PPG17 differ from what replaced it?
PPG17 was cancelled when the National Planning Policy Framework took effect in March 2012. The NPPF kept the principle that planning should provide for open space, sport, and recreation, but it did not reproduce the detailed typology and assessment procedure. Councils were left to set their own evidence base, and many continued to commission PPG17-style studies because the method was familiar and defensible.
Two things changed in practice. First, the language moved from open space to green infrastructure, which widened the subject to include connectivity, biodiversity, and climate functions. Second, the evidence base became more tightly tied to the local plan timetable, so an assessment had a shorter shelf life and was more often refreshed alongside housing and employment land reviews.
What survived is the core logic: audit the sites, survey the residents, map the catchments, publish the standards. A council that skips the survey and sets standards from hectares alone will struggle to defend them.
What the assessment produced
The final report usually contained four things. A typology map and site schedule, listing every audited site with its type, area, and condition score. A set of provision standards, expressed as quantity, quality, and accessibility for each type. An analysis of gaps and surpluses, ward by ward or settlement by settlement. And recommendations, which might include new provision in an allocation, improvements to an existing site, a change of management arrangement, or a planning obligation tied to a specific development.
The standards are the part with the longest life. Once adopted as a local standard, they can be used to negotiate contributions from developers and to test planning applications. That is why the survey and the audit matter: a standard that can be traced back to a measured site and a sampled household is harder to set aside than a figure chosen for convenience.
Reading an old assessment today
Anyone opening a PPG17 study now should read it as a dated document. The site schedule may list land that has since been built on. The survey reflects the population of its year, not the current one. The catchments were drawn against the road network and the housing of the time.
What remains useful is the method and the baseline. An old assessment tells you what a council once measured, how it defined its standards, and where it thought the gaps were. Read alongside current aerial imagery and the adopted local plan, it shows which of those gaps were closed and which were not. For a parish council, a residents' association, or a student of planning, that comparison is often the fastest way into a local open space argument, and it starts with the archive rather than the current policy file.