Last chance to have your say on future development of Northumberland

The Northumberland Local Plan, which provides a blueprint for the county up to 2036, will form the basis of how planning applications are decided.

The document was submitted to the Government in May 2019 before the examination phase started in October.

During the public hearings – including the separate sessions for the section of the plan dealing with minerals, waste and renewable energy – the planning inspectors have requested various pieces of further information and evidence from Northumberland County Council.

The eight-week consultation on these submissions, which can be found at https://tinyurl.com/y9uamxgp, closes at 5pm on Monday, September 7.

It will be followed by a second phase of hearings and then another public consultation on any proposed modifications to the plan, meaning it is not likely to be in place until well into 2021.

Cllr John Riddle, the cabinet member for planning, said: “Now that the examination is underway, the timetable is very much in the hands of the inspector, and Covid-19 is inevitably having an impact on the process. The planning team is working closely with the inspector in the hope that things can be progressed as quickly as possible.”

Even before the impact of Covid-19, however, the target date for adoption had already slipped from March this year – set following an intervention by the then Local Government Secretary Sajid Javid in early 2018 – to the end of 2020.

But this was based on the phase two hearing sessions taking place this summer and they are now provisionally slated to start on Tuesday, October 20.

And there could be further disruption through changes proposed in the Government’s Planning for the Future White Paper, which is out for consultation until Thursday, October 29.

As previously reported, one of the proposals is for local plans to be overhauled so that they ‘set clear rules rather than general policies for development’ – they would be visual and map-based, significantly shorter in length, ‘limited to no more than setting out site or area-specific parameters and opportunities’.

Analysis by Lichfields suggests that while the current ‘standard method’ sets out the number of new homes needed annually in Northumberland as 651, under new proposals, this would be almost doubled to 1,172.

The Northumberland Local Plan proposes 17,700 new homes over the 20-year plan period from 2016 to 2036, or 885 a year, although average delivery in the last three years has actually been 1,570.

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