From the viewpoint of social inclusion, ensuring accessibility to essential services and opportunities, such as employment, education, health and shopping, is one of major challenges that Japanese cities face under this aging and depopulating society. This article addresses an approach, called accessibility planning, that has been taken since mid-2000s in England with the similar goal, and overviews the background in which it was advocated, its overall framework and the standard appraisal methods of accessibility. The article also reports cases of Greater London, West Midlands (Black County) and Liverpool, in which they have tried to reflect and/or incorporate quantitative accessibility appraisal into spatial planning in order to deal with inaccessibility problems not only through transport measures, but through integration with land use planning.