Cheshire East closely monitors neighbourhood plans | Knutsford Times

Cheshire East closely monitors neighbourhood plans

By on April 18, 2018

Cheshire East Council has reviewed neighbourhood plans nationwide to ensure that the authority is delivering best practice for residents.

The council’s neighbourhood planning team has been thoroughly researching neighbourhood plans across the country to see what types of policies they contain and create a resource to compare what other community planners are doing.

The data reviews the size of each community’s population, whether the plan allocates housing sites and how many homes are allocated.

Greg Wooldridge, a planning policy apprentice at Cheshire East, said: ‘It’s been a great project to work on and organising a big piece of research like this has been a real learning curve. I certainly understand our country’s geography much better now.”

Greg also mapped this data and displayed it in charts, all of which are available on the neighbourhood planning pages of the council’s website.

Councillor Ainsley Arnold, Cheshire East Council cabinet member for housing, planning and regeneration, said: “As far as we know, this is the only resource that draws information from all neighbourhood plans across the country into a single tool.

“We think it’s going to be really useful for anyone preparing a neighbourhood plan, particularly those  who want to benchmark their approach against similarly-sized communities.

“We’re hoping that this makes a helpful contribution to the national agenda on this important planning work and we will be expanding the data to monitor what other types of policy neighbourhood plans are covering.”

The resource is available on the Toolkits section of the council’s neighbourhood planning web pages.

The council continues to support local communities to prepare neighbourhood plans, four of which – High Legh, Poynton, Calveley and Wrenbury – are considering allocating housing sites in their plans.

You can find out more on the neighbourhood planning pages of our website at: https://www.cheshireeast.gov.uk/planning/neighbourhood-plans/neighbourhood-planning.aspx

About Lucy Thorpe

Lucy Thorpe is a freelance journalist who writes for the Knutsford Times - covering stories and news in and around Cheshire and Greater Manchester. If you've got a story to share, or would like to speak to Lucy, please email news@knutsfordtimes.co.uk

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