By Cllr Vicky Glover-Ward, Executive Member for Planning and Growth, East Herts District Council
I have become aware that at least one political party is spreading misinformation about the Call for Sites and District Plan review as part of their leafleting to residents so I thought it would be worth setting out some facts about the process supported by documents and a meeting video so that residents can avoid being misled.
- The review of the District Plan has not started as yet, but East Herts Council is undertaking two items of preparation work:
a. Visioning – which will be presented to Council in March and then will have some public engagement work
b. The Call for Sites. - The ‘Call for Sites’ gives a list of the land in the district on which landowners would like there to be development or biodiversity net gain or other uses such as solar farms. After the initial ‘list’ is assembled there is a huge amount of work done by planners to assess whether the sites submitted are suitable for development according to strict criteria. Some of the sites will not pass this assessment.
- Once the sites have been assessed and the District Plan review is STARTED (anticipated autumn 2025 but we are waiting on approval from government) at that point the sites that have PASSED the assessment will be considered as to whether or not they should be included in the District Plan as a nominated or strategic site.
- There are two formal consultations.
- In the last District Plan review the Call for Sites yielded 288 sites and 18 were selected for the District Plan.
- The current call for sites includes 283 sites all of which will need to be reviewed.
- Planning permission to develop sites can be applied for whether the site is in the District Plan as a strategic site or not so even if a site is not included in the District Plan it is not ‘protected’ as was alleged in the leaflet.
Details on the programme for the District Plan review can be seen in the Local Development Scheme, which can be downloaded here.
The full explanation of the Call for Sites process can be watched at here. The Call for Sites explanation starts about 6 and a half minutes into the meeting.