The Parish of
ASHBURY NEIGHBOURHOOD PLAN
Welcome to the Parish of Ashbury Neighbourhood Plan’s [ANP] dedicated web-pages. From this, our home page, you will be able to navigate to other areas of our site to find; details of the Plan Steering Group, minutes of meetings & other reference documents as well as posts updating residents on our progress.
What is a Neighbourhood Plan?
Neighbourhood planning was introduced through the Localism Act 2011. Such plans are created through direct engagement with the community they relate to, and provide the opportunity for residents to influence the manner in which their community develops. By following the required processes such Plans become part of the statutory development plan for the local area to be used in conjunction with specific national and county planning policies when considering future developments.
The draft policies of the plan were published toward the end of 2017, when a number of opportunities for residents to comment on them and/or ask any question in respect of same were provided. Arguably the most important of these was a public meeting in late October where our consultant, Jeremy Flawn of Bluestone Planning [BSP], laid out the policies and the reasons for proposing them, followed by a Q&A session to enable residents to seek clarification on any areas of concern. This was a particularly useful exercise as the feedback from residents enabled the steering group to tweak one or two of the policies to specifically address the valid points raised during this consultation exercise.
This was followed by the Pre-submission Consultation, where both parish residents and specified statutory bodies were consulted on the Plan, the feedback from which has, where appropriate, been incorporated into the Plan documents. The satisfactory completion of this exercise enabled the Steering Group on behalf of the Parish Council to submit the finalised Neighbourhood Plan to the District Council [VWHDC] for examination on 9th October 2018, when the Independent Examiner for the ANP has provided his comments that were in the main positive and the few changes he suggested were incorporated into the ‘Referendum’ version of the Plan.
This in turn was ‘signed off’ by the District Council and as a consequence the all important referendum was held on 4th July 2019. The result was favourable and the Plan was sent to the District Council for final approval and deemed to be ‘made’.
The site has now been updated with these finalised Plan documents all of which can be accessed by clicking the respective links to the left of this page as before. Also listed are the ‘Consultation Report’ summarising the methodology of the pre-submission consultation and the responses received, and the ‘Basic Conditions Statement’ setting out how the Plan meets the specified conditions, both of which are mandatory supporting documents.
We are happy to address any queries residents and/or businesses may have. Our Email address is: n.plan@ashbury.org.uk