Forum Digest 7th August 2021

Community Masterplanning

Back in June in his Chairman’s Forum Update, Richard mentioned that we had received grant funding to extend the masterplanning work contained in the draft Neighbourhood Plan. The grant has been provided to the Forum by Locality and Groundwork UK to initiate the work needed to create a Neighbourhood Development Order (NDO) covering Chetwynd Barracks and those parts of the Toton Strategic Location for Growth that are now described as Toton East & Toton South in the Strategic Masterplan – Supplementary Planning Document (SM-SPD) which is being developed by Notts County Council, Broxtowe and EMDevCo.

The funding received is over £40,000 (a significant sum!) for this initial work. As the Forum is not incorporated, the grant is held by our Community Interest Company (CIC) acting as the accountable body on our behalf. Both parties have had to ensure due diligence with processes in place to provide an audit trail for the money spent, as this is essentially public money provided by the Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG).

We are now in a position to let you, our members, know that we have appointed & contracted Kefa Design as the consultants for this masterplanning work, and that the work is underway. So exciting times ahead! Some of you may remember that Kefa Design previously provided the high-level masterplan designs for us in the draft Neighbourhood Plan, and with that prior knowledge of our Area, they can now take that further and provide a more detailed masterplan guided by the Forum’s policies, aspirations and guidelines set out in the draft Neighbourhood Plan i.e. to put ‘more meat on the bone’ so to speak.

Clearly there is a lot going on in our Area currently, and the various masterplanning exercises may seem confusing, but we will try and provide as much clarity as we can as things progress. There will be a series of consultations and public engagement exercises on all these in the coming months. As well as the formal and official methods of communicating these, we will also let you know via the Forum digest. In addition to the Forum response to each of these, we encourage all members of the Forum to provide their own individual responses to ensure the community as a whole has its say on what we all know will be significant development in our Area, whether or not HS2 comes to Toton. These are both exciting and daunting times for us all, but if we want to shape the future of Toton & Chilwell for the benefit of the existing and future community, as well as the generations to come, we need to ensure our collective and individual voices are heard loud and clear. The coming Forum AGM will provide an opportunity to engage or re-engage with these developments. More on this in the coming weeks.

More information about NDOs can be found here under Further Reading at the bottom of the web page.

Please do feel free to ask any questions you may have on this or anything else via the Contact Us page, and we’ll do our best to answer them via the Questions and Answers page.

David, Vice Chair

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