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10 Nov 2014

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The Draft Local Plan – where are we now? Free-for-all development to continue until the May 2015 district council elections

Click to access 211014-item-7-local-plan-update-rpt.pdf

An awful lot of shoulds and mights and identifying milestones by seasons (spring, summer) but no actual dates.

What is totally clear is that the free-for-all for developers is certain to last the full term of this council, with adoption of the Local Plan scheduled for AFTER the May 2015 elections (presuming it is not thrown out again in which case a new council has to start the process all over again).

There must be some very happy developers out there – and look out for the usual raft of new planning applications just before the Christmas shut down at the council.

3 thoughts on “The Draft Local Plan – where are we now? Free-for-all development to continue until the May 2015 district council elections”

  1. Consultation (on Main Modification) is scheduled for “summer 2015”, presumably meaning that it will START in summer 2015, which means August 2015 start, and (say) October or November 2015 for consultation to have closed, been analyzed and reported on. So when it says “Plan Adoption 2015” it can only mean close to the end of 2015.

    Then it goes on to say that this is the most optimistic possible timetable with risks of delays due to non-delivery (again!!) of consultants reports, new issues, need to find more development sites, all of which “could cause delays in the timetable”.

    So, bearing in mind the history of progress (or lack of it) and delays (lots of them, some surprises at the last minute) so far on the Local Plan development, we can reasonably assume that there will be some delays, and that Local Plan adoption might easily not happen until 2016. Perhaps the title for this blog entry should be “Free-for-all development to continue until 2016” or possibly even “Free-for-all development to continue until the May 2019 District Council elections”.

    P.S. Surprise, surprise – the “Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Needs Assessment” is “running behind projected original timelines” – so yet again the ink is not dry on the plan before delays are appearing.

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  2. I wonder if EDDC and the consultants can add years to their housing supply numbers fast enough to keep pace with the delays in this project. 6 years housing supply from 2014 is to 2020 but 6 years supply from 2016 takes us to 2022. I wonder if the consultants will need another 1.5 years to give housing numbers for the years 2021 and 2022 (presumably they have just been working on numbers to 2020), so that the plan can cover a 6 year housing supply? Forgive me if it is supposed to be a 5 year supply – but the same question applies.

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