Regional spatial strategy for the West Midlands

The main purpose of the Regional Spatial Strategy for the West Midlands is to provide a long term land use and transport planning framework for the Region.

The framework guides the preparation of local authority development plans and local transport plans.

It determines (amongst other things) the scale and distribution of housing and economic development across the Region, investment priorities or transport and sets out policies for enhancing the environment.The RSS incorporates the Regional Transport Strategy.

It is a partial revision of Regional Planning Guidance No. 11 (2004, ISBN 9780117539075). A number of issues identified with RPG 11 were divided into three blocks of work for revision.

This publication incorporates phase one of the revision, dealing with the Black Country.

Phase one revision only impacts on a small part of the RSS, and subsequent reprints will incorporate the remaining phases of revision: phase two includes housing and employment, and phase three includes environment issues.