Tameside pushes local plan forward
Tameside Council’s executive cabinet has signed off publication of the draft Homes, Spaces, Places document, opening up the public consultation phase.
This is a critical stage in the local plan process that all councils must go through, effectively inviting feedback on how site allocations for housing and employment land have been approached by officers following earlier calls for sites.
In setting out the background to the report, Tameside officers recorded that the local authority has long held ambitions to prepare and bring forward a local plan, and had started work, it had remained mindful of the need to dovetail with the Greater Manchester-wide Places for Everyone plan.
The document has gone through various internal processes – four consultations have fed into plan preparation – and is now published for public consumption, a statutory stage that provides an opportunity for organisations and individuals to make representations on whether the plan is legally compliant and sound prior to its submission for examination.
The report for cabinet said: “HSP is clearly important for Tameside in building on the foundations laid out in PfE for the scale of growth and ambition envisaged for the borough over the next 15 or so years.
“It will be part of the Council’s Development Plan and alongside the strategic sites and policy context provided by PfE, it will provide a framework of further policies to be used in the day-to-day determination of planning applications, providing the local distinctiveness where that is absent from PfE.”
On the ever-contentious issue of Green Belt, the position is that Green Belt was reviewed as part of the PfE process, with additions and deletions made, and thus will not be altered again so soon.
The statutory requirement is that consultation must run for a minimum of six weeks. The full meeting papers can be viewed on Tameside’s website, with the draft plan, meeting papers and appendices running to more than 2,500 pages.
