The draft Policies and Places Local Plan will be subject to another 6 week public consultation starting 5 Feb 2018 to 19th March (this was supposed to have happened last autumn). It will then be submitted to the Planning Inspector who will carry out an examination in public.
The documents will be published on 5th Feb on this link
https://shepway.gov.uk/planning/planning-policy/local-plan/places-and-policies
and you will be able to comment online here:http://shepway-consult.objective.co.uk/portal or by email planning.policy@shepway.gov.uk or by post to the council offices.
Unlike the previous consultations your comments will have to relate to the “soundness” of the local plan . To be sound the local plan must be
- Positively prepared
- Justified, effective
- Consistent with national policy
As far as we know Princes Parade is still allocated as a development site in the draft plan despite the high number of objections from members of the public as well as Historic England and the Heritage Dept at Kent County Council. We are hoping that the consultation documents will set out the council’s justification for ignoring these comments.
Although the council has now submitted a planning application to itself for Princes Parade, it is important that we try to get Princes Parade deleted from the local plan because if it is still in there when the local plan is adopted any subsequent application will be granted planning permission almost automatically. For that reason we urge you to also look at the other sites in the district which have been allocated in the plan.
There will also be another public consultation starting soon – this time on Shepway’s Revised Core Strategy. This is the document which sets out the overall strategy on which the Local Plan has been based. You can see this document here http://www.shepway.gov.uk/moderngov/documents/s25986/2018_01_17_CS_Review_Appendix_1.pdf with the revisions in red. As you will see some of the revisions relate to increases to the annual targets for new homes – 633 compared with the figure in the current Core Strategy of 350. (The Government have recently set a min target for Shepway of 490.) The other big change to the Core Strategy is the inclusion of Otterpool as a major strategic development site ie as a way of achieving the new annual target.
We will publish guidance to help you respond to the PPLP once we have had a chance to read the documents.