Planning Methods Brief

The recently introduced Local Enterprise Partnership’s (LEP’s) should be meticulous in identifying barriers that impede growth in local and regional economies and subsequently apply the necessary strategic planning policies to overcome socio-economic issues. Relative to this, the specific focus of the following briefing paper analyses the methodological steps required by the policy makers in the Greater Birmingham and Solihull LEP to assess current issues correctly in order to apply appropriate strategic policy action. In addition, the report clarifies the possible indicators that provide an outline of socio-economic conditions in the LEP, as a parallel, recommendation on reliable data sources will be provided. Important enquiries will be made in regards to monitoring and measurement of indicators for future planning strategy in the LEP. Currently the necessity to measure the outcomes resulting from data research within spatial policy is absent from the existing local Government Performance Framework (RTPI.org.uk). Significantly, the spatial planning system requires the development plan and core strategy be created on a robust credible evidence base.

Methodology: Recommendations for the development indicators, research and analysis.

Rationale

The fundamental reasons of analysing indicators is to explore their patterns of spatial distribution and to investigate the degree to which there is measurable co-variation and interactive effect across different issues of the phenomenon studied (Wong 2006). Such analysis is generally guided by existing theories on the relationship between different factors or variables. There are however, major difficulties when connecting independent variables and the measurement of these variables in p...

... middle of paper ...

...d for each listing the size of the house (in square feet), the number of bedrooms, the average income in the respective neighborhood according to census data, and a subjective rating of appeal of the house. Once this information has been compiled for various houses it would be interesting to see whether and how these measures relate to the price for which a house is sold. For example, you might learn that the number of bedrooms is a better predictor of the price for which a house sells in a particular neighborhood than how "pretty" the house is (subjective rating). You may also detect "outliers," that is, houses that should really sell for more, given their location and characteristics. However, there are negatives in using the regression model for prediction, for example it makes the assumption that the current model remains valid for the predicted observations.