Hello….and welcome back!
The 4 weeks since you last heard from us has flown by. As I said then, we all needed a short breather from the pretty intense period of firstly drafting and publishing the Plan itself and then consulting you on it. But it’s now time to get back to the task of refining it and getting it over the line. However, for this first post-consultation edition, I’ll be relatively short and snappy.
1. Final consultation statistics
- Mark, our web maestro, has collated the figures during the 10 weeks or so of consultation and the numbers are very impressive:
- 1,419 different people accessed our website during this period.
- On the page containing details of the Plan itself we saw a total 1,694 views albeit this figure will include those accessing the page multiple times
- Of the 800 or so recipients of these digests, it looks as though about 260 people (it’s difficult to be precise) directly clicked through to the Plan itself
- The Plan document was opened and viewed a total of 772 times. Again, this will include people opening it several times.
- Overall, we can safely say that over 800 people looked at the Plan out of approx 6,700 households in our Area.
- Final number of people/organisations providing feedback was 119 comprising:
- 92 residents – people who live in our Area
- 9 ‘friends’ – people who live elsewhere but are interested enough (mostly relating to the Barracks) to let us have their views
- 18 businesses/stakeholders – including landowners, Broxtowe Borough Council and Notts County Council
- I know I’m repeating myself, but these are truly impressive numbers – thanks again to all of you who took the time to respond. We will be reporting these statistics in our Consultation Statement and will certainly add weight when the Plan is assessed by the independent examiner.
2. Plan progress
- The Steering Group held a meeting a couple of weeks ago to decide how best to share the significant workload to review all the comments received. I think I warned you last time this review will take a little time. We appreciate the effort and time you put aside to provide feedback, and we need to give it all due consideration.
- It is already clear some parts of the Plan will need a bit of re-work – not least Section D ‘Chetwynd Barracks’. It is clear some stakeholders misunderstood its purpose. The section doesn’t list more policies although some stakeholders seemed to think it did. So, we’ll need to spend time clarifying its purpose – which is to set a framework to be used by the master planners for the site.
- The key thing will be not to rush this work. We are building a Plan to stand the test of time. And as someone recently said (in another context), we shouldn’t rush decisions based on a ‘spasm of impatience’.
- You’ll hear more on this over the next few weeks as we work to refine and strengthen the final version of the Plan.
3. And finally….
- Broxtowe Council’s Local Plan Part 2 was formally adopted at the full council held last week! This is good news as the Council’s policies are now cast in concrete. We now need to ensure our policies are fully compliant and provide the further layer of specifications we want to see developed in our Area.
- HS2 project review. You will no doubt have heard about the review being undertaken by the government regarding the future of HS2. And you may have heard the rumours that the eastern leg of Phase 2b (Birmingham to Leeds via Toton) is being scrapped. Until we get the decision, we are continuing as if East Midlands Hub Station in Toton is still being built. But, clearly, if the eastern leg is scrapped, we will need to assess the impact on our Plan. We understand the decision is expected fairly soon, perhaps in early November. We’ll wait and see…
- Affordable Housing We know how important it is to quickly build affordable homes and one of our members sent in this link to a scheme in Norwich that has won the prestigious Riba Stirling Prize. It is an interesting read and something for us to learn from – and perhaps try to emulate – when it comes to our Area. Let us know what you think.
And that’s enough for this week. I’ll report next time on the various meetings we’ve held over the past few weeks, which includes a meeting with the new leader of the council, Cllr Milan Radulovic.
Kind regards
Graham
Broxtowe Lotto: tickets available from our CTTC Forum page where you’ll find details of the scheme.