Issue - meetings

Cabinet received a report which followed the approval of the Council’s Local Development Scheme (LDS) by Cabinet in July 2015, which identified that the Council would prepare a Preliminary Draft version of the Local Plan for public consultation in January 2016.

The purpose of the report was for Cabinet to approve the Preliminary Draft version of the Local Plan for public consultation and to delegate authority to Officers to make any minor, inconsequential amendments to the document prior to its publication.

The Cabinet Member for Growth, Planning, Housing and Economic Development introduced the report highlighting the main points contained within. Peterborough was one of the fastest growing cities in the UK with 1300 new homes being built in the last year and policies were in place to provide future growth and development up to 2026. There was however the need for a new Local Plan to take account of changes in national policy, new housing needs numbers and to ensure the Council could maintain a five year supply of deliverable housing sites.

The Preliminary Draft Plan set the overall vision and objectives and identified the broad distributions and areas for growth, it set out how the city and surrounding villages would grow and change over the next 20 years and it would replace the existing adopted plans. It was advised however that the site allocations element was not included within the current draft, as this would form part of the feedback during the consultation process.

Following additional comments from the Council’s Principal Strategic Planning Officer, Cabinet debated the report and key points raised and responses to questions included:

·         It was a European requirement that all plans be subject to sustainability criteria, therefore a sustainability framework that matched the Environment Capital Action Plan themes had been put in place and throughout the document the relevant symbols indicated how the Plan met all the environment capital themes and also showed how the Plan contributed to the city becoming the UKs Environment Capital;

·         In relation to selection of sites, as part of the consultation agents and developers would be asked to put forward local sites that they would like to see included. The sites would be collated and measured against specific criteria, which would rule certain sites out automatically. There would be a range of reasonable alternatives that would also be assessed and a Member Working Party would meet to look at all the options and alternative sites in order to assist in the formation of the recommendations. Preferred sites would then be included in the next version of the Plan with supporting evidence setting out how each site scored against all the assessment criteria and giving clear justification for each site rejected;

·         A new five year land supply report had been published in November 2015 which concluded that there was not sufficient land deliverable to meet the five year requirement as set out in the Core Strategy. Following publication of the Draft Local Plan for consultation in January, an update would be  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7