Decision details

Cllr Graham Turner, Portfolio Holder for Finance and Regeneration introduced the item, advising the Panel that this is likely to be the first of many updates as the Local Plan is rolled out.  Progress is being made, however, as the Panel will appreciate, these things take time, and there is short capacity within the Planning Department, however reasonable progress is being made and things are moving forward.

Johanna Scrutton, Planning Policy and Strategy Group Leader, provided the Panel with an update on the Local Plan Review, advising that the review was undertaken in the summer 2023, in order to get it through the process before the end of the five year period, which for Kirklees was February 2023.  A report outlining the process to be taken was presented to the Scrutiny Panel in September 2023. 

The Panel was reminded that the assessment was based on the Planning Advisory Service Review template which looked at three main topics covering 14 questions, regarding the delivery of the spatial strategy, whether there were any Council priorities that had impacted on the plan, and whether the plan policies themselves were still compliant with local plan guidance.

The review outcome indicated that the plan was out of date in several areas including, the lack of five year land supply, the Council not meeting its housing delivery targets, and the potential for employment delivery.  There were known sites that were coming forward, however they had yet to enter the planning process in terms of the Council's priorities.  While the Local Plan was found to be sound in terms of sustainability, the Council's climate action plan was developed after the plan was adopted, therefore, the review provided an opportunity to relook at plan policies to assist towards net zero.

In terms of the planning policies, service users were spoken to, monitoring for development management in applications and appeals were looked at, and most of the policies were still found to be working.  It is also important to stress that the whole of the plan is not out of date, the Local Plan National Planning Policy Guidance and the supplementary planning documents will continue to be the main tools that will be use in determining planning decisions.

The Planning Officers Society were invited to give an independent view on whether it should be a partial or a full review.   In their opinion, because of the interrelationship between the strategy, the planning policies, the cost and transparency to communities, it was determined that it would be better to do a full review.

The Panel was informed that in order to address the situation that the Council did not have a five year land supply, an interim housing position statement was produced, and that was presented to scrutiny in November 2023 and taken to Cabinet in December 2023.  Work has also been undertaken on a revised Local Plan timetable, which is not just the timetable for the local plan, but a whole range of other planning policy documents and the Statement of Community involvement has also been updated.  These went out to consultation from November to December.  The Statement of Community Involvement was updated on the basis of comments and feedback and the aim is that both those documents will go to Cabinet in March 2024.

The Panel was provided with a summary of the main elements of the plan that is currently being worked on, and advised that an early engagement exercise will be undertaken, inviting community comments on the vision objectives and the contents of the plan. 

The Panel was referred to section 2.7 of the appended report which outlined the evidence and advised that:

-          the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) requires the Local Plan to be underpinned by relevant, up-to-date and proportionate evidence and which considers relevant market signals and is relevant to the plan making area

-          there is evidence from stakeholders and consultation

The range of evidence will be used to inform not only whether the Council’s policies
could be developed further, it will help inform the climate change policies, and also it will help shape and inform the spatial strategy.

The Panel was informed that with regard to the sites, there has been a call for sites which has been open since 2020, which is ongoing and will be promoted again as part of the early engagement.  Sites are coming through for that process which will need to be assessed once the housing and employment needs and requirements are established.  There is an ongoing brownfield land register, and work is being undertaken internally with different services to look at identifying priorities and what the needs are, and how to accommodate those.

There is a great deal coming through in planning guidance with the revised planning policy framework, and there are more changes proposed and as it progresses there will be further opportunity for Scrutiny.

In response to the information presented, the Panel made comments and asked questions including some of the following:

-      Can you outline how this work is going to align with the environment strategy work, because the environment strategy has quite a bit about housing and brownfield first approach, and people being within a certain walking distance of green spaces. Therefore, can you outline how the Local Plan work, and the Environment Strategy are going to fit together?

-      Whilst reading this report, it is clear that it is a significant project, however it is difficult to see how things comes together.  Is there any way of producing graphics that show all the different threads, how they come together and what the key points are to help to get a handle on this and see how it flows through?

-      Many of the houses that are coming forward are either in flood plains or affected by inadequate drainage.  How good and up to date is the strategic flood risk assessment and even when not in flood zones,  is an account taken for the displacement of water from areas surrounding the development, and what measures are put in place for that?

-      With regard to flooding and the requirement on an individual development to put in place attenuation tanks based on an assessment of the likelihood of flooding,  is there anything that can be done through this process, to update council policies to give more strength to the planners when they are looking at these developments, that they put  greater emphasis on the amount of surface water that they are able to capture through these tanks?

-      Currently, in planning policies there does not seem to be anything that adequately picks up on the issue of cumulative impact for example on matters such as flooding and transportation.

-      One of the issues that does not appear to have been mentioned and raises questions about whether there is something that can be done through planning policies to strengthen, and tackle the fact that retailers shrinking and to encourage town centre living or convert some of the retail space into other usage.  It would be advantageous to build something into policies and visioning with regard to that.

-      In terms of the early engagement, what will be the role of Councillors in that, as it is not clear from the report if Councillors are treated as one of the stakeholders.

-      How do you define housing need, for example in Dewsbury?  Is it the people who live in Dewsbury, or is it the whole of Kirklees.  It is not about the numbers; it is the type of houses, and therefore there needs to be place-based housing policies to identify the types of housing that need to be built in different parts of the district as they are going to be very different. 

-      Kirklees is a very diverse area with different communities, and the current plan does not seem to reflect this, and appears to be a more broad-brush approach. There is a piece of work to be done around how do we square that
and how to get the right types of houses built in the right areas that reflect the demand in those areas?  It is important that Council policy better aligns with what the actual demand and the housing need is in a particular locality.

-      How much discretion does the Council have, in terms of the types and numbers of housing, and how demand is met?

-      What comes first, the Local Plan or the transport needs assessment for different places and how do they fit together?  Many areas are now suffering from a lot of infrastructure not being there to support what is being built or has been built. Has consideration been given to how to improve the connection between infrastructure and local plan, if there is no plan for our infrastructure, how do all of these developments that are going to come forward and have already come forward feed into that infrastructure need that already exists?

RESOLVED:

That

a)          Johanna Scrutton, Andrea Lane, Edward Highfield, David Shepherd and Cllr Graham Turner be thanked for providing an update on the Local Plan.

b)          officers undertake a task to create a flow diagram of the main stages of the Local Plan process and what is required at those stages to aid understanding of the plan requirements/outcomes.