New housing and employment land proposals – next steps

Planning officers are working through more than 4,000 responses to the consultation on proposed sites for new homes and employment land across Shropshire.

Consultation into preferred sites for development took place over the summer, following lots of work between Shropshire Council and local parish and town councils since April 2010, when the draft Site Allocations and Management of Development (known as SAMDev) Plan was published.

Since then, parish and town councils and local communities indicated whether they would like their area to have some future development, and landowners suggested sites that they wanted to be considered for development.

Those views and sites were considered by Shropshire Council planners, and the preferred options were put out to consultation over the summer for people to give their feedback.

More than 4,000 responses were received, and are now being logged and analysed by the planning team.  The next steps are to identify key issues and any potential changes to the preferred sites.  Work will take place to look at any newly promoted sites, evaluate new evidence, and consider any potential alternative preferred sites.

Parish and town councils will be contacted over the coming weeks and months to clarify their responses, and further consultation with the public is likely to take place during the spring and summer of 2013.

The first part in the spring will focus on about 20 development management policies expanding and clarifying the ‘policy directions’ consulted on earlier this year.

There will then be a further stage of public consultation on any suggested changes to preferred sites for housing, employment and minerals extraction.  This will include an opportunity for people to comment on any revisions to sites or figures for new development in market towns and smaller towns and villages which are designated as ‘hubs and clusters’.

The overall aim of the SAMDev Plan is to allocate sites for various types of development and set out further detailed policies to guide future development across Shropshire up to 2026. This will ensure that all future development is appropriate to the size of the settlement, town or village.

Councillor Mal Price, Shropshire Council Cabinet member for planning, said:

“It’s great that so many people put their views forward, and it’s important that we take our time to fully consider all of the responses.  Parish and town councils are an integral part of this, as their indications of how much development they wanted in their area formed the basis of how many preferred sites were allocated, so we need to speak to them to clarify their views.

“We can then work through any changes to the preferred sites resulting from the extensive consultation over the summer, before putting forward revised and then final proposals next year.”

For more details on the SAMDev Plan click this link.