St Albans City & District Council has published a number of draft planning documents. These documents will be considered at two public meetings to be held on Wednesday 19 and Monday 24 September.
The documents include a draft housing target for the District over the next 17 years and the draft Strategic Local Plan.
Once formally adopted, the Strategic Local Plan will set out planning policy in the district, including a framework for infrastructure and development policy, up until 2028. The Plan will partially replace the 1994 Local Plan on which planning policy is currently based.
Both draft documents are available on the Council’s
website.
The documents are nearing completion and the Council is keen to showcase them. The Council is also seeking preliminary views as to whether they have been produced in line with planning and legal regulations and are ‘sound’ in legal terms.
The meeting on 19 September is an opportunity for people to hear where we are in the process and the constraints under which the Council is operating. There will be an opportunity for questions and answers.
Councillors and members of the public are invited to submit comments on emphasis, clarity of the document and issues arising. These will be considered further at the meeting on 24 September.
The Local Services Scrutiny Committee meeting on 27 September will consider the documents and comments from the public meetings, before they go to Cabinet on 18 October.
The documents will then be considered by Full Council in November. Council’s agreement will be sought to publish the Strategic Local Plan, for its final procedural stage.
Once agreed by Council, the final draft version of the Strategic Local Plan will progress to what is known as ‘pre-submission publication’ in late 2012. This is a final opportunity for people to comment on the plan’s legal soundness. This ‘pre-submission publication’ phase is the final stage following the series of detailed consultations conducted over the last few years. Once responses have been considered, the final version of the Strategic Local Plan will be submitted to the Secretary of State for examination.
The meetings on 19 and 24 September begin at 7pm and take place in the Council Chamber. The meetings can also be viewed via
webcast either live or after the event.
Councillor Teresa Heritage, the Council’s Portfolio Holder for Planning and Conservation said: “The Strategic Local Plan is the most important document that this Council will produce in the next 5 years. It sets out a vision for the district of the next two decades. It reflects what residents say they want their district to look like and sets out how we can achieve this.
“The content is substantially the same as was consulted upon in 2010/11. What we have been working on is robust evidence to support the policies, a fundamental requirement for its submission to the Inspectorate.
“We need the East of England Regional Spatial Strategy to be revoked before our local plan can be put in place. We expect the revocation to happen by Spring 2013. This is why we have been working to a timetable to get our draft Strategic Local Plan submitted to the Inspectorate by this Christmas.”
Councillor contact:
Cllr Teresa Heritage, Portfolio Holder for Planning and Conservation, St Albans City and District Council, Tel: 01582 761014; Mobile: 07866 458977
Contact for the media:
Claire Wainwright, Principal Communications and Marketing Officer, St Albans City and District Council, Tel: 01727 819572, E-mail: claire.wainwright@stalbans.gov.uk