Neighbourhood Plan

The Neighbourhood Plan Review Working Group

Parishioners will perhaps remember that the Gnosall Neighbourhood Plan was drawn up some years ago at a time of great challenge, when the village boundary was changed by Stafford Borough Council and developers sought to build in several different places.  We were the first local area to have our NP approved and it came into force in July 2015, when it became part of the Plan for Stafford Borough – the Local Plan.

At the time our NP was written, housing was the main thought uppermost in everyone’s mind and there were very few examples of other Plans to see as we were fairly early adopters. Since then, time has moved on. Other areas have included in their plans sections on leisure, changed work patterns, ecology matters and so forth, although the main aim is still to have a plan-led housing delivery, rather than an ad hoc developer-led one.

When ours was written, there was little mention of how long a Plan was expected to last. It became part of the Local Plan and that bore a date of 2011-2031, so when the Gnosall NP was formally adopted in 2015, there was a feeling that the pressure was off. However, Stafford Borough Council have been obliged to renew their Local Plan ahead of their original schedule and that means that the NP may also have to change. People are understandably concerned lest a similar boundary change should leave areas less well-protected again or that Neighbourhood Plans would have to be hastily reconsidered in order to synchronise with a new Local Plan.

It is difficult to know whether to sit tight and await the publication of the new Local Plan, then engage in furious rewriting of the Neighbourhood Plan, or to consider now what changes in focus we might want and draw them up in draft form, ready for the publication of the new Plan. On balance, we have chosen to take the second course of action.

There are challenges associated with this. Very few of the councillors involved in drawing up the original NP are still active and some of the most knowledgeable parishioners who were key to its development are sadly no longer with us. This means that a great many of us are learning on the job, as it were. So we felt it would be sensible to invite those original members who were still available to form a working party with councillors from the Planning Committee, to help map how we might begin to redraft the NP. We also invited local people that we felt knew a little about the planning process to join us.

We have begun to consider what broad improvements might be made and we are all in agreement that the first and most important thing to do is to find out what parishioners want to see (or not see) in their parish. To that end we are rewriting the Parishioner Questionnaire with a view to making it live as soon as possible.

This task is a tough one, especially with so many new commitments since 2015, so little time and no additional funding (as yet – we shall reapply again this year.) Pressures on councillors and parishioners alike have never been heavier and so we have tried to be realistic in our timescale and to meet every four weeks.  We have very little to share just yet as we are firmly in the investigative phase but notes are taken and reported back to Planning and subsequently to Full Council.

Our questionnaire will be distributed across the parish in the coming months and we would like parishioners to complete it so that we can begin to compile our evidence base and then to see how we can reflect that back to Stafford Borough.

Neighbourhood Plan Working Group, March 2024