Building Our Plan
This is where we’ve archived some of the raw materials from which we first began building our draft Neighbourhood Plan.
Our first online survey closed in mid-April 2020 – and headline analysis showed that the town wanted us to focus on leisure, culture and commerce.
The challenge was to take the views expressed in response to our questionnaire… and synthesise these into workable policies.
At all times, we needed to concentrate our efforts on issues that can eventually be enshrined in enforceable planning guidelines.
At a meeting on 8 September 2020 we reviewed draft policies under the six headings outlined below - and these were boiled these down into five new categories.
In January 2021 we appointed Alison Eardley and Chris Bowden to help take our draft plan into a second round of public consultation.
In April 2021, they created a "skeleton draft" of the plan. As the term suggests, this was a very rough outline document, showing the possible scope of our ideal submission: where we’d made good progress, the proposals were presented in almost complete form; but other areas were far sketchier.
We decided not to publish this document in full but instead to issue a shorter Progress Report, which you can access here.
Throughout this process we welcomed input which we encouraged via regular posts on Facebook and Twitter.
Headline analysis of our 2020 online survey
so all of our assumptions and statements must be evidence-based.
It’s worth checking out this elegantly-produced writing toolkit for neighbourhood planners; and an online search will direct you to neighbourhood plans at various stages of
completion up and down the country.
It’s interesting to see so many different approaches – evidence, of course, that every single community in the land faces a unique set of issues.
Bengeo
Horsham
Stortford
ONE OF THE challenges we face is pitching this at the right level – not too detailed yet not too vague and abstract either. And our final submission will be rigorously assessed,
Transport
Leisure
The High Street
Employment
Design and Heritage
