The Local Plan: Final Version

We wrote in January about the long process involved in establishing the new Local Plan, and the Examination in Public in which we participated in November last year. In the succeeding months, several changes to the daft Plan were considered by the Council and the Inspectors, and the final version was formally approved at a meeting of the full Council on 19 July. We regret that many of the changes weaken policies of which we approved: in countless cases ‘must’ has been changed to ‘should’, with the result that developers have been given much more wiggle room on matters such as tall buildings, for example. The final version of the Plan is here, and we shall be keeping a close watch on how individual applications are dealt with in accordance with the new policies.