Issue - meetings

As detailed in the recommendations.

Having earlier declared a personal and prejudicial interest on this agenda item, Councillor Banks was moved to the virtual lobby during for the duration of the presentation, discussion and vote.

Councillor Bithell introduced the report and explained Cabinet needed to consider and agree the responses to the representations received to the Deposit Local Development Plan (LDP) consultation exercise for recommendation to County Council for agreement and submission of the Plan to Welsh Government (WG) and Planning Inspectorate (for Public Examination by an independent Planning Inspector).

The Chief Officer (Planning, Environment and the Economy) explained that the Deposit LDP was approved for public consultation by County Council on 23^rd July 2019.   Consultation took place between 30^th September and 11^th November 2019 and attracted 1281 representation from 657 separate respondents.  Following consultation, the Council, as Local Planning Authority (LPA), had a statutory duty under the LDP regulations to make available all the representations received.  That had been done by placing them on the LDP consultation portal and in a summary table on the Council’s website.

At the last meeting of Planning Strategy Group on 30^th July 2020, the group endorsed all of the recommended responses made to representations received to the Deposit LDP and recommended that they be considered by Cabinet and then County Council as part of agreeing to submit the plan to WG and the Planning Inspectorate for Examination in Public.  In doing so, some Members understood that responses to the plan had to be considered as a whole in order to move forward and that there would be some Members of the Council who would have issues with parts of the Plan for policy-specific or ward-specific reasons.  It was important that all Members had the understanding that the Plan needed to move forward as a whole, and that the Examination in Public was the place where the final independent scrutiny of the soundness of the plan would be carried out.

A hyperlink, which was the summary of the representations, was included in the Cabinet report. 

The Chief Officer (Planning, Environment and Economy) thanked Councillor Bithell for his long term support of the LDP process and for his chairing of Planning Strategy Group, and thanked all other Members of that group too.  A number of briefing sessions for Members had taken place the previous week where a summary of the situation was presented.  The sessions were split into geographical areas and in total, 41 Members attended.  There was no evidence to say we should not continue on this path.  Many people who had made representations had said they would like to make representations at the Enquiry and that was in the gift of the Inspector.  The Enquiry would be in early 2021. 

A further report would be submitted to Cabinet to seek delegated authority for any minor changes to the Plan that may be required by the Inspector to be undertaken.

Councillor Roberts also thanked all the Members of Planning Strategy Group and the officers for  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7