Planning, Parking, Highways & Transport

To consider approval of a new Local Development Scheme for the Royal Borough for the next three years to the end of 2025. This programme includes work on the Traveller Local Plan.

Cabinet considered approval of a new Local Development Scheme for the Royal Borough for the next three years to the end of 2025. This programme included work on the Traveller Local Plan.

Councillor Haseler, Cabinet Member for Planning, Parking, Highways & Transport, proposed the recommendations and explained that every Local Planning Authority was required to prepare and maintain a document known as a Local Development Scheme (LDS). The document set out the timetable for the preparation of planning documents such as Local Plans, it did not include supplementary planning documents. The LDS was a three-year project plan for preparing planning documents, it was not a policy document itself. It provided information to the local community and stakeholders regarding planning documents that were being prepared by the Council and the timetable for when these documents would be produced. In particular, it set out the timetable for the review and update of the Council's Local Plans and outlined the dates when there would be formal opportunities to get involved with the plan making process. Approving the document which would ensure the Council had an up-to-date programme for future local plan work, in accordance with its legal requirement to do so. Local residents and others would then be aware of the expected future work programme.

He advised that if the LDS was not approved it would mean that communities and other stakeholders would not know what planning documents were proposed to be produced and the Council would not be in line with the regulations. The Borough Local Plan was adopted in February 2022, the Minerals and Waste Plan in November 2022. Progress on the Traveller Local Plan had been slower than anticipated due to a number of factors, particularly the need to prioritise officer resources into taking the BLP through to adoption. However, a consultation on issues and options was undertaken in 2019 with a consultation statement published in 2020. The 2018 Gypsy and Traveller Accommodation Assessment was updated in 2022 and this set out the need for pitches and plots up to 2036/37. National planning policy in the Planning Policy for Traveller Sites required that Councils identify a supply of deliverable and developable sites to meet the needs against locally set targets along with criteria-based policies to guide land supply allocations. Although the BLP included a criteria-based policy for the assessment of proposals for Gypsy & Traveller accommodation, it did not allocate any Gypsy & Traveller pitches or Travelling Showpeople plots. As such, it was necessary to produce a separate Local Plan to meet these needs and allocate new sites for these groups. Councillor Hasler concluded that the proposed timetable set out that the Traveller Local Plan would be submitted for examination by late Summer/early Autumn 2024 and, subject to a timely examination process, adopted by Summer 2025.

Councillor Johnson seconded the recommendations.

RESOLVED UNANIMOUSLY that:

i)               the report be noted;

ii)             the Local Development Scheme for 2023-2025 be approved for planning policy purposes and to publish it on the Council's website to take effect from 1 January 2023; and

iii)            authority be delegated to the Head of Planning, in consultation with the Cabinet Member for Planning, Parking, Highways and Transport to make any minor non-material corrections to the Local Development Scheme as considered necessary ahead of publication.