The Last Lap

Shropshire Council has appointed Louise Brooke-Smith to examine the Three Parishes Neighbourhood Plan. We have supplied all of the relevant documents and now we wait to see if there will be any follow up questions.

It’s been a long haul to get to this point. All Neighbourhood Plans should come with a warning: Never Do A Neighbourhood Plan in a pandemic, but we got there thanks to the hard work of the amazing volunteers from each of the parishes and thanks to those who took time out to respond to consultations.

Final step, should we pass inspection, will be the referendum of which more later. In the meantime all we can do is wait and see.

Regulation 14 under way

Regulation 14 is the part of the process where you, the residents get to look at the plan in its almost complete state and make any final comments before we move on to the next stage of the process (nearly there now).

Please make any comments either online (preferred, at the home page), or by filling in the form attached to the summary document that should be coming through your door any day now. Although clicking on the link takes you to Adderley Parish site, this is the response form for all 3 parishes.

There is a 50-page full document, this can be seen at locations in the covering letter. This details the whole process. The summary contains the policies that will be adopted into law if it passes the inspection stage.

Nearly there!

We now seem to have overcome the last problems with the grant request and it is now full steam ahead to get the regulation 14 packs out to all residents for comment. The distribution is likely to take place in the 2nd week of November, with responses required by the 2nd week of December.

You will be able to return physical copies of the responses, or post them online.

Hiatus

For various reasons, amongst them waiting for a quote and the fact that Shropshire Council decided they wanted to review our draft document when they didn’t have time to, we have had a hiatus in production of the plan.

However, Shropshire Council are ready to go and today we had the final quote necessary to apply for the last grant.

The steering group are meeting tonight in Moreton Say Village Hall where we can now hopefully thrash out the steps needed to produce the consultation document.

Watch this space.

To and fro!

Because we were delayed by Covid amongst other things, we did not finish the tasks that were required in the last financial year. This means that we have had to return the unspent part of last year’s grant money. However, we are finalising the policy document and we are able to apply again for what we need to achieve in this financial year (which should finish the process).

Very soon, a summary document will be posted to every house in the 3 parishes with which will be a comment sheet so that you can give us your feedback. This then drives the final version which will be voted on at a referendum. If this passes, it is then sent for examination before becoming planning policy. So we are nearly there, just the last couple of hurdles to go.

Nearly there!

The draft neighbourhood plan is almost finished. The steering group’s next meeting is on Wednesday 6th April, at which hopefully we will agree the final format ready to be published so that everyone can have a look and make any comments before we move onto the final stage. We really need as many comments on the consultation as possible, as this is not our document, it is yours. It has been created by using all the comments from the parish meetings, questionnaires etc. This will affect any planning requests going forward, meaning that this is a document that will be used at Parish level to base decisions on.

The way forward

At the steering group meeting a couple of days ago, the rest of the Neighbourhood Plan process was discussed, along with the grant and how that affects the budget. We are now in the process of evidence gathering by aPt, which combines all the evidence that we have gathered so far from online data, survey responses, village hall meetings etc. This will give us a way to start the process of writing the plan. We now seem to have lost SRCC’s involvement in this process, so discussions were had over what can be done by the steering group and what might need further consultant help.