Draft Local Plan 2042
What is a Local Plan?
The Local Plan guides future development within the Test Valley area. It sets out planning policies to address our communities’ needs e.g. the amount of housing and employment needed, and how we intend to deliver sustainable development. It also covers policies on our town centres, countering climate change and conserving and enhancing our local environment and heritage. We also use it in assessing planning applications.
The Local Plan is produced by us (Test Valley Borough Council), in our role as the local planning authority, and must follow national guidance at each stage
Why is it important?
Local plans are important as they shape how places will change in the future. The Local Plan can play a key role in helping to deliver local priorities, such as those identified by our Four Year (Corporate) Plan 2023-2027.
The Local Plan will influence future changes within local communities. These changes can be at a wider scale, such as the location of new residential development across the borough or at a local scale, such as the parking provision on new development. The Local Plan will set out the policies and principles by which planning decisions will be made and development undertaken, across the borough.
This is having a plan-led approach where our communities have the opportunity to comment on the proposed approach to addressing our housing and employment needs. An up-to-date plan allows us to influence the location of future development through the policies in the plan to ensure development is focussed in the most sustainable locations with the appropriate amount of infrastructure delivered alongside.
If you and your community are seeking to influence the future of Test Valley, the Local Plan is the place to start.
Where we are with preparation?
The Council is currently working on a new draft Local Plan. We have already undertaken four stages of public consultation Issues and Options consultation (2018), Refined Issues and Options Consultation (2020) , Regulation 18 Stage 1 (2022). and Regulation 18 Stage 2 (2024) We are now at the point of a Revised Regulation 18. Consultation is anticipated to take place over the summer running for approximately 10 weeks, subject to the decision at the Council meeting on Wednesday 18 June.
Why is there another Regulation 18 stage?
Since we last consulted on the draft Local Plan, national planning policy has substantially changed to reflect the Government’s ambition of increasing the delivery of homes both nationally and immediately. This means our housing need has significantly increased from 524 homes to 934 homes per year. To address this, we are having to revisit the Regulation 18 stage of plan preparation to identify how we are seeking to meet the increase in number of homes, through additional site allocations.
We need to have an up-to-date plan in place against which sets out detailed policies of requirements from development to enable the council to determine planning applications. The Council needs to show that we have 5 years’ worth of supply of housing land, which is made up of sites with planning permission or sites identified in the adopted Local Plan (2016) likely to be permitted in the next five years.
Without an up-to-date local plan, the Council cannot show that is has a 5-year supply of housing land as required by Government. This means we are at risk of speculative and unplanned development, already occurring in the borough. Moving forward at pace with the Revised Regulation 18 is important to make sure an up-to-date local plan is in place as quickly as possible to ensure developments are shaped by an adopted Local Plan and are in the right place with the right amount of infrastructure. This also ensure that proposed sites have also had the opportunity to be informed by public consultation. The consultation on the Revised Regulation 18 draft local plan is the opportunity to comment on the proposed sites and tell us what you do want and why.
What happens next?
The Local Plan will go through several statutory stages of preparation which includes public consultation before it is examined. The current stage is the Regulation 18 Stage and the next Stage is Regulation 19, which is the final round of consultation before we submit the draft plan to the Planning Inspectorate for an examination in public. If found to be appropriate through the examination process, it can be adopted. Upon adoption it will replace the current Test Valley Revised Local Plan 2011-2029 which was adopted in January 2016 (the adopted Local Plan is available here).
The timetable for the draft Local Plan 2042 is set out here