Meeting documents

Invited witnesses

Ms Sarah Housden, Policy Manager, North York Moors National Park Authority

Ms Jo Ireland, Community Partnerships Manager

Ms Jill Low, Planning Manager

Mr John Romanski, Senior Neighbourhood Planning Adviser, Planning Aid England

Support officers

Mr St John Harris, Overview and Scrutiny Manager

Mr David Walker, Forward Planning Manager

Members are reminded of the need to consider whether they have a personal or prejudicial interest to declare in any of the items on this agenda.  If so, the nature of the interest must be declared at the start or as soon as the interest becomes apparent, of the meeting.

No declarations of interests were received.

The following information is attached:

(i)                 report by the Overview and Scrutiny Manager (attached)

(ii)               programme for the review (attached)

(i) Welcome by the Chair of the Task Group, Councillor John Ritchie

Councillor Ritchie welcomed all those present to the meeting and explained the background, objectives, scope and format of the review.

(ii) Neighbourhood Planning Process

John Romanski, Senior Neighbourhood Planning Adviser, Planning Aid England delivered his first presentation.

Why Neighbourhood Planning?

Even with the most policy compliant planning application, you still get objections to it and you can still get communities pressuring a Planning Committee to refuse an application that may be recommended for approval by planners. 

Lack of understanding of implications of planning applications

The idea behind NP is if you allow communities to shape and develop planning policies, they will understand what is and is not acceptable in planning terms and therefore this should reduce the amount of objections and conflict that you have with policy compliant developments. 

What is Neighbourhood Planning?

Three neighbourhood planning tools with identical statutory process: Neighbourhood Plans, Neighbourhood Development Orders and Community Right to Build Orders (type of NDO but with minor differences in what they can promote and who can get engaged in undertaking).

Neighbourhood Plans

What would a Neighbourhood Plan look like?  It’s almost an impossible question to answer because the plan will depend on what the Community wants to promote e.g. a simple policy document on brick colours for house extensions or an area action plan for an area dealing with all sorts of policies across housing, environment etc – a mini local plan. The NP does not replace the Council’s existing Local Plan which will still have effect.  There is no point in doing a Neighbourhood Plan if it is simply going to repeat policies that are within the Council’s Local Plan and development management policies. Most successful Neighbourhood Plans I have seen coming forward are those that promote policies where there is a policy vacuum where maybe the local plan doesn’t deal with that issue or maybe that you need to put a local spin on the generic development management policy.  Some Councils are devolving site allocations to community groups so the Council will allocate the sites and the Neighbourhood Plan will decide the context and design of that site: what the homes are going to look like, what the layout is going to be, the quantum of developments.

Neighbourhood Development Orders

A Neighbourhood Development Order is very similar to the existing Local Development Orders: it essentially grants planning permission in full or in outline on the particular sites e.g. in order to avoid the planning process a community might promote some affordable housing or a community centre or ensure some commercial development has some community element to it, so a developer would not need to go through the full planning application process provided they accorded with the contents of the Neighbourhood Development Order.  The developer would still have to submit an application to the Council to ensure that it complied with the Development Order but it’s a way of almost circumventing the planning application process.  These  ...  view the full minutes text for item 2.