Supporting Continous Impact: Changing Policy and Practice to Facilitate Neighbourhood Planning in England

A core strategy of the Reading Real Estate Foundation (RREF) is to support and nurture the advancement of research in the sphere of Real Estate. We undertake this by funding two key initiatives, PhD Scholarships and RREF Seed Funding, to foster innovation at the Department of Real Estate and Planning, Henley Business School, a globally renowned centre for teaching and research excellence. 

RREF Seed Funding, while facilitating new research, can also play an integral part in helping to enable established research to maintain momentum and thus generate future impact.
 

As an example, our Seed Fund helped to fund a workshop on Neighbourhood Planning at the RTPI young planners conference, a large practitioner event attended by around 300 early career planners, to support Professor Gavin Parker and Dr Matthew Wargent’s research on ‘Changing Policy and Practice to Facilitate Neighbourhood Planning in England’. At the conference in Southampton they were able to showcase their research and facilitate a workshop on issues in neighbourhood planning. This achieved greater impact for the research and demonstrated the practical application of research in this area of policy.

This topic area also formed the basis of a Research Excellence Framework (REF) impact case study submitted by the Department in 2020 for consideration for the REF assessment exercise. Neighbourhood planning research at the University of Reading is now widely cited and recognised across the policy and practice community – as well as the academic peer group. Ultimately events such as this enable the profile of the Real Estate and Planning Department to be maintained and aid the evidencing of research impact.

Discover more about this research here, and how you can help support research as part of our Research Appeal to ensure we can continue to maintain our support of these vital activities.

RREF is committed to supporting new research to enable the discovery of new solutions and insights, if you are interested in supporting research or discovering more about what projects are being supported please contact us at [email protected] or on +44(0)118 378 4069.