Food & Health Alliance

The Toolkit developed by Living Streets: Scotland is designed to be used by policy and decision makers and professionals within local authorities including planners, transport planners, roads engineers, access, sustainable development and health improvement officers and town centre managers.

The Toolkit Provides:

• A summary of the evidence on the link between physical activity, health and the built environment.
• The policy position on physical activity, health and the built environment.
• Approaches to integrating healthy environments into planning, transport and other local authority strategies and programmes.

In addition the toolkit also consists of fifteen practical measures that help improve the walkability of the public realm, including relevant guides, standards, audits, and assessments.

• Community Street Audits are a method for evaluating the quality of public spaces – streets, housing estates, parks and squares – from the point of view of the people who use them rather than those who manage them.
• There are two key elements to a Greenspace & Open Space Audits a quantitative audit of the amount and type of open space and an assessment of the quality and community value of open space.
• By adopting 20mph Limits in built-up areas allows for the safe mixing of motorised and non-motorised modes of transport, and makes it easier for pedestrians and cyclists to enjoy the same direct and safe routes for their journeys as motorists. By adopting this ‘level playing field’ approach to speed limits, local authorities can encourage pedestrians to take to their streets and in so doing increase their levels of physical activity.
• Designing Streets for People: the new planning policy Designing Streets together with its companion document Designing Places aims to apply the principles of good design for new and, wherever possible, existing streets. It incorporates the principles of PAN 76: New Residential Streets as well as more comprehensive information and guidance and therefore will supersede PAN 76. The intended outcome is streets that are better designed for the needs of pedestrians, cyclists and public transport users, as well as contributing to the quality of the built environment and quality of place.
• Local Design Guides are commonly developed by local authorities to enhance policies in Local Plans, or to integrate local considerations and characteristics into national guidance. This supplementary planning guidance prioritises the needs of pedestrians in urban and street design.
• Placecheck is a method of assessing the qualities of a place, showing what improvements are needed, and focusing people on working together to achieve them.
• Placemaking is a multi-faceted approach to the planning, design and management of public spaces. It involves looking at, listening to, and asking questions of the people who live, work and play in a particular space, to discover needs and aspirations. This information is then used to create a common vision for that place.
• Public Realm Design Guidance can be applied to all spaces between buildings that can be freely accessed, it encompasses all outdoor areas including roads, parks, squares, pedestrian routes and cycleways.
• Design for Play a guide to creating successful play spaces2, provides ideas and practical resources for building new play spaces in a fresher and more inspiring manner. The guide, supported by CABE Space, advocates a fresh design-led approach to commissioning, based on 10 principles and encapsulated in one golden rule - a successful play space is a place in its own right, specially designed for its location, in such a way as to provide as much play value as possible.
• Tackling Anti-social Behaviour covers a wide range of selfish and unacceptable activity that can blight personal and community quality of life, prevent the renewal of disadvantaged areas and create an environment where more serious crime can flourish. This guide looks at how these issues can be addressed.
• Health Impact Assessment (HIA) has been defined as ‘a combination of procedures, methods and tools by which a policy, programme or project may be judged as to its potential effects on the health of a population, and the distribution of those effects within the population'. HIA uses a range of methods and evidence to identify potential or actual health impacts of policies or proposals in order to maximise positive impacts and minimise any negative impacts on health. The purpose of HIA is to provide information to inform decision making. Therefore, it is usually done before the proposal has been implemented.
• Integrating Health into Planning Equally Well, the report of the Ministerial Task Force on health inequalities, contends that public services will need to redesign and refocus if health inequalities are to be tackled effectively.
• Cleanliness Index Monitoring System The Cleanliness Index Monitoring System (CIMS)has been developed by Keep Scotland Beautiful (KSB) to assist local authorities to assess local environmental quality. The CIMS package provides a reliable and consistent method of validating street cleansing.
• Scottish Transport Appraisal Guidance and Evaluation of Active Travel Projects. The wider health benefits of sustainable modes of transport such as walking and cycling can now be captured by transport appraisals, allowing authorities to consider the costs and benefits of potential walking and cycling proposals.
• Health Improvement tools for the Single Outcome Agreement Process. In early 2007, the Scottish Government’s Public Health & Wellbeing Directorate commissioned NHS Health Scotland (NHSHS) to review and sharpen performance management of actions to improve Scotland’s health outcomes and reduce health inequalities. This is known as the Health Improvement Performance Management (HIPM) Review. The overall aim of the HIPM Review is to support the National Performance Framework (NPF) and the introduction of Single Outcome Agreements (SOAs) with local authorities and their partners. The first phase of the review involved development of a performance management framework for health improvement. In the second phase NHSHS produced a number of tools to support community planning partners in developing SOAs. The tools help to clarify links between longer term local outcomes in SOAs against which progress is publicly reported and the shorter term outcomes of service delivery that might be included in performance management information.

Wherever possible, case studies have been provided to demonstrate the practical use of the tools.

The toolkit can be downloaded from the Living Streets website.