Welcome to the Yorkshire Landscape Planning Forum
The Yorkshire Landscape Planning Forum (YLPF) is an informal network of people, local planning authorities and other organisations based in and around Yorkshire. It was set up in 2014 and aims to reflect and respond to members’ interests and needs. For both members and non-members, this website pulls together information on landscapes and local planning and provides useful contacts, examples of good practice and links to topics of general or current interest.
The principles of the European Landscape Convention (ELC) underpin the Forum. It therefore covers all landscapes - whether outstanding or ordinary, urban or rural - that determine the quality of people’s living environment. The Forum also strongly promotes greater awareness and understanding of landscape, and cross-border cooperation and mutual support in protecting, managing and planning for landscape.
Aims of the YLPF
The Yorkshire Landscape Planning Forum comprises planning and landscape professionals, meeting up to three times a year at venues provided in turn by members. There is currently a focus on landscape planning within the public sector, but in practice, public, private, academic and voluntary sectors are interdependent, so the main requirement for membership is an interest in the topic. This website aims to facilitate links between members, particularly when it is not feasible to attend meetings.
What is Landscape Planning?
Landscape planning has been defined in Article 1 of the European Landscape Convention as 'strong forward-looking action to enhance, restore or create landscapes'. Definitions of landscape and landscape policy are also set out in the Convention and its Explanatory Report. Managing landscape change in a way that recognises the great diversity and the quality of the landscapes that we have inherited in Yorkshire is a continual challenge, involving reconciling competing land uses whilst protecting natural processes and cultural and environmental resources.
The ELC encourages public authorities, with the participation of local people, to adopt policies and measures at all levels for protecting, managing and planning landscapes. It strongly promotes interaction between authorities, recognising that landscape has no borders and this is also reflected in the National Planning Policy Framework's 'duty to cooperate' in local plan-making. Natural England provides detailed guidance on implementing the ELC, including a checklist in Part 2 for integrating it into plans, policies and strategies, while ICOMOS-UK has an downloadable booklet which summaries the aims of the Convention.
