The Liverpool City Region Spatial Development Strategy, UK

The Liverpool City Region Combined Authority (LCRCA) Spatial Development Strategy (SDS) is a statutory planning document that provides a strategic plan for the development and use of land across the six local authorities of Halton, Knowsley, Liverpool, Sefton, and Wirral for the next 15-25 years. The SDS will set out an integrated economic, environmental, transport and social framework for the development of the Liverpool City Region.

RealWorth have a long-running appointment with the LCRCA to deliver an ongoing social value evaluation of the SDS. Since 2019, RealWorth has been tasked with evaluating the social value of every policy within the SDS at every stage in its development, to ensure that it considers social impacts in areas such as health and wellbeing, as well as their economic outcomes.

Over the past four years, RealWorth’s role has included:

• Completing a Background Paper on Social Value explaining and illustrating the concept of social value and how it relates to the SDS.
• Identifying the social value potential of specific policy options, under a number of criteria such as health, inclusive economy and placemaking and the implications of each policy on people’s lives.
• Providing comments on LCRCA’s objectives for the SDS that encourages developers to integrate social value into new planning applications.
• Writing a specific social value policy to embed social value into the SDS.
• Conducting ongoing social value reviews of LCRCA’s policies to ensure they meet the social value objectives.

Going forward, RealWorth will conduct a predictive assessment of the social value that the SDS is likely to generate prior to the Examination in Public. The assessment will be a publicly available document when it is produced.