Marlborough Town Council has set out on the path towards drawing up an officially approved Neighbourhood Plan. It is a long and complex process and as one councillor told Marlborough News Online: “It’d be nice to get it finished before the council elections in May 2017.”
If this sounds like a dull and dry load of old bureaucracy – read on: it is vital for the future shape of the town and the preservation of its heritage.
Two town councillors have been selected to work on drawing up the plan – Councillors Mervyn Hall and Justin Cook. As Mervyn Hall puts it: “We are giving the community the opportunity to have some say about how the town develops in the future. What do we want to see Marlborough looking like in thirty years time?”
Mervyn Hall points out that most of the changes in Marlborough’s history have come about by accident or at least by happenstances the town could not influence – fire, civil war, canal building, railways coming, a pub being turned into a public school, road building, railways taken away and so on.
But development in the form of the big new estates to the north and west of the town “changed the nature of the town” in the 1970s. So care in planning is needed.
Justin Cook is passionate about getting the town’s community much more of a say in future developments – especially as regards housing and roads.
There are of course other advantages to having a neighbourhood plan – not least the increase from 15 per cent to 25 per cent of any Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) money generated from developers that does not go to Wiltshire Council, but goes to the Town Council to be spent as it sees fit on infrastructure improvements. That is the government’s openly stated incentive to get local people involved in the planning process through Neighbourhood Plans.
Although not many Neighbourhood Plans in this part of the county have come, so to speak, to term. They have already been used successfully to control housing developments.
There is a hierarchy in the planning regime. The top level is the government’s National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF.) Then, for Marlborough, comes Wiltshire Council’s Core Strategy and finally there will be Marlborough’s own Neighbourhood Plan. Each element in the hierarchy has to comply with those above it.
Wiltshire Council, as the local planning authority, will have a key role in drawing up Marlborough’s Neighbourhood Plans – they have the roles of referee, linesmen and, to some extent, owner of the stadium.
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Malmesbury succeeded in achieving Wiltshire’s first fully approved Neighbourhood Plan – and members of their team have already been giving Marlborough councillors some advice. See our separate report on how Malmesbury reached their goal and the successes it has brought the town. |
The Neighbourhood Plan process has six steps. But these steps rely on the formation of a Planning Group, which needs to represent as many of the town’s institutions and business entities as possible. Malmesbury’s Group had 21 members, but only a small sub-group undertook the detailed work involved.
Step one is to agree on the extent of the ‘neighbourhood’. This may include parishes with boundaries to the town: Minal, Preshute, Savernake and probably Ogbourne St George could for this exercise all be part of the ‘neighbourhood’. Wiltshire Council will arrange a six week consultation on this and then decide on the area.
Step Two involves drawing up a draft plan – taking account of all possible interests and people likely to be affected by it. Step Three is the consultation on the draft plan.
Step Four will see Wiltshire Council checking that the draft plan complies with all the legislation and higher planning rules. The plan is then sent by Wiltshire Council to an independent examiner – Step Five.
Once he – or she – has approved it, the Plan is then put to a referendum. Anybody registered to vote in the area covered by the Neighbourhood Plan is entitled to vote. A simple majority of votes (over 50 per cent +1 of those voting) in favour of the Neighbourhood Plan is enough for it to succeed.
These steps cost money. Some councils have decided to outsource the whole process to consultants. But that can be very expensive indeed – costing up to £100,000. On the other hand, benefitting from a huge amount of voluntary work, Malmesbury’s plan cost £28,000.
Part of the reason that Marlborough is only starting the process now is that some councillors considered the plans too expensive and a waste of the council’s already stretched resources. But they have put aside £33,500 for the whole exercise and are seeking a government grant as well.
There is one sentence among the government’s many pages of rules and advice on drawing up neighbourhood plans that gives pause for thought: “Neighbourhood planning is a voluntary activity.”
At one level that simply means that towns and parishes do not have to draw up these plans. However, there is another meaning as well: the process needs a great deal of voluntary input or ‘activity’, a lot of volunteer hours and hard work.
A successful plan relies very much on the skills of those on the team, the breadth of interests involved, the quality of information available to voters, the standard of the consultation and, of course, the robustness of the plan itself.
