Barnsley's Local Plan

The adopted Local Plan and policies map sets out how the council will manage physical development of the borough on behalf of residents and businesses. This includes providing sufficient land in the right places to attract more businesses into the borough and to allow existing businesses to grow. The aim of this is to create more and better jobs to improve earnings and increase opportunities for local residents. It also aims to provide improved housing to meet existing need and the needs of future generations whilst at the same time protecting what is special about the borough.

Following public consultation and examination by an independent planning inspector, Barnsley's Local Plan was adopted by Full Council on 3 January 2019. 

Barnsley’s statutory development plan consists of the:

Following the adoption of the Local Plan we've produced new and updated supplementary planning documents (SPD)  These documents contain advice for people applying for planning permission. We use these to help us make decisions on planning applications alongside the Local Plan. We've recently adopted an update to the design of housing development SPD and a new sustainable construction and climate change adaptation SPD on 27 July 2023.

We recently asked for your views on updates to three existing SPDs including financial contributions for schools, house extensions and other domestic alterations and biodiversity and geodiversity. Find out about the draft supplementary planning documents (SPD) consultation.

The Local Plan includes some site allocations which require the production of a masterplan framework. The individual site policies explain why a masterplan framework is needed.

Local Plan review

The Local Plan review was endorsed at a meeting of Full Council on 24 November 2022. The review concluded that the Local plan remains fit for purpose and is adequately delivering its objectives.

This means no updates to the Local Plan, in whole or in part, are to be carried out ahead of a further review. A further review will take place in 2027 or earlier if circumstances, including fundamental changes to the Local Plan system, require it.

Local Plan map

You can see the allocations on the map below.

Local Plan

View full-screen map

You can also download the inset maps as PDF documents:

  1. Districts
  2. Movement
  3. Public spaces
  4. Development sites
  5. Primary shopping area and shopping frontages
  6. Surface coal resource
  7. Petroleum exploration and development licence (PEDL) areas
  8. Tall buildings

Further information

You can read the Local Plan adoption statement here.

Following the examination process, a number of changes were made to the Local Plan before it was adopted.

The Inspector's Report and its appendix set out the inspector's recommendations for changes that we had to make following the examination process and the reasons for them. These modifications and the associated map changes have been incorporated into the adopted Local Plan.

We also made and published a number of additional changes (including some minor changes to the policies map) and further changes that do not materially affect the policies in the plan:

We also produced a guide to the changes made to policy and site reference numbers in the adopted Local Plan.

All of the modifications have been incorporated into the adopted Local Plan and policies map (January 2019).

For more information

If you're interested in the Barnsley Local Plan and would like us to contact you about future consultations on the plan, supplementary documents and the evidence base that supports them, you can join the Local Plan contact register.

If you have questions about the Local Plan, please contact us using our online form.