The design review: good-practice checks

The compliance checker asks whether the geometry is right: bend radii, visibility splays, widths, junction spacing. The design review asks the other question — whether the scheme is a good one. It is the second group in ✅ Checks, and it reports the things an officer picks a layout apart on.

What it looks at

• Layout and access — cul-de-sacs that run a long way to serve a handful of homes, how many homes sit behind a single point of access, streets carrying more homes than their type is meant to, and an entrance in an awkward place.
• Power runs — on a scheme with power runs drawn for the temporary works, the load wired from each generator against its rating: a warning when it is over, never a failure. The loads are typical figures that are ours unless you entered your own.
• Getting around on foot — homes the walking network cannot reach at all, routes far longer than a well-connected layout would need, and neighbours severed from one another by a missing link. These have their own page: Walking checks.
• Refuse — how far a bin is carried from the door, how far the crew drags it to the vehicle, and how far the vehicle has to reverse. See Bin collection and street checks.
• Fire — appliance access to each dwelling.
• Open space and play — play equipment beside open water, and public space that no window overlooks.
• Planting — twenty checks that read the real species on the drawing. Invasive listings, toxic planting near play, thorns over a route, mature size against the space it is given, water demand near foundations on shrinkable clay, root protection areas on retained trees, and each species against the site’s own soil, pH, hardiness and exposure. Pro and above — see Planting real species.
• Numbering — plot numbers that jump about rather than running in a sensible order.

Every finding says what it rests on

This is the part worth understanding, because it is what makes the rest trustworthy. A finding that claims to breach a standard, when it does not, costs you the credibility of every other finding — including the compliance ones, which are the ones that matter. So each rule declares two separate things.

What the concern rests on:

And separately, where the number came from — which is the thing most easily fudged. A rule can rest on published guidance and still use a figure nobody published: the guidance on play beside open water names the hazard and expressly declines to give a separation distance, so quoting one as though a document said it would be inventing authority. Each finding is therefore marked figure from the source, widely used figure, or our figure, not from a document.

Reading and using the findings

Findings appear in the Checks panel alongside the compliance ones, each with its basis, its source where there is one, and a badge on the drawing. Click one to ring its badge on the drawing; Zoom to it zooms in. They carry into the PDF planning pack and onto the DXF CHK_* layers in the same way, so what you issue says the same thing as what you saw.