A Map for England is an initiative launched in March 2012 by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI), the UK body that represents 23,000 planning professionals, to make publicly available major maps for England relating to policies and programmes on the economy, transport, communications, housing and the environment that are held by individual government departments.
The Institute argues that there is still no single place or data source within government that makes all of these maps available to view.
It would also, it is claimed, increase consistency in appraisal, improve security and resilience, and provide a better understanding of sectoral issues that might complement or conflict with each other.
The RTPI commissioned a study[1] from the University of Manchester examining a broad range of existing government policies and how they relate to each other.
By overlaying a number of these maps and diagrams together, the researchers demonstrated that some policies and programmes, when considered against each other in relation to different parts of the country, may have unintended consequences.