Annual Monitoring Report

In addition to community involvement and sustainability, another important aspect of the new planning system is to monitor and review the success of planning policies. Local authorities are required to produce an Annual Monitoring Report (AMR) as part of their Local Development Framework (LDF).

Main functions of annual monitoring

There are two main functions of the AMR:

To measure the Council's progress in preparing its LDF documents, by comparing what the Council has achieved over the past year against the timetables set out in the Local Development Scheme (LDS).
To look at the borough's planning policies and see whether they are achieving their purpose. This is done using indicators and targets.

For example, if the Council is seeking to minimise the amount of greenfield land being used for new housing, an appropriate indicator would be "percentage of new dwellings granted permission on previously developed land". The target for this is currently set at 60%.

If the Council has fallen behind the LDS timetable in preparing documents, or if planning policy targets are not being achieved, the AMR should explain why this has happened, and should suggest how these situations might be put right.

Copies of the report

You can download copies of the Annual Monitoring Report for the last five years by using the links below. The latest copy was published on the 14 December 2010.