581
From:
To:
Ldf, Derby
Subject:
Response to Derby City Pre-Submission Local Plan Part 1 Core Strategy Consultation
Date:
23 October 2015 16:43:14
Dear Derby City LDF Planning,
I am responding to your consultation on the Pre-Submission Local Plan Part 1. I should apologise
that I have not used the form available, but I felt that I had to use this opportunity to
communicate my thoughts, which many Mickleover residents share right now, about the effects
that the planning process seems likely to have on our community, sitting as we do at the
junction of three local authorities. I’m sure you will be able easily to identify a box that these
thoughts fit in to, rather better than I. If I had to identify a specific set of paragraphs in the local
plan document to refer to it might be Core Principle CP1(b) and paragraphs 1.23 to 1.30, and I
also refer to “Figure 5 – Key Diagram”, depicting the sites in and around the city ... I have read through the plan document and supporting material; including all the good words
about “duty to cooperate”, “Placemaking Principles for Cross Boundary Growth” and looked at
Figure 5 - Key Diagram showing the city with its identified housing sites, cross boundary sites and
adjoining sites in South Derbyshire and Amber Valley. I noted that the diagram looked as I had
expected it to, that nothing unexpected had changed since the previous iteration.
Three weeks into this consultation I find on the agenda for the next full council meeting of
neighbouring South Derbyshire, on 24 th September, a proposal to include a huge new strategic
site (called “Land West of Mickleover”) in that authority’s area along its boundary with my
neighbourhood, Mickleover, within Derby City. At 1,650 dwellings this site would be larger by far
than any strategic housing site identified in Derby City’s pre-submission plan. On that very day,
24 th September, I attended Derby City’s drop in session for its pre submission plan consultation
and found that none of Derby’s spatial planning officers there had known anything about what
their neighbouring authority was proposing to do until the same day that I did, a few days earlier
when SDDC’s council agenda documents were published. On that day 24 th September the South
Derbyshire council meeting accepted this “Land West of Mickleover” proposal from its planning
team.
Derby City had submitted concern about South Derbyshire’s inclusion of this site as a “potential”
reserve site in the previous iteration of SDDC’s local plan, and all references to that potential
reserve site had been removed in the plan that SDDC eventually submitted for examination.
Derby City subsequently submitted various concerns in consultation responses to developer
planning applications to South Derbyshire for one corner of the Land West of Mickleover site.
What on earth happened to the duty to cooperate between these two authorities?
How can I consider Derby City’s plan to be sound and the process to be sound when its
neighbour has bolted this huge site onto the edge of the city, justifying its sustainability largely
on the basis that the site would be exploiting all of the infrastructure in and around Mickleover
and the City generally, while the City’s plan that is currently in consultation makes no reference
to this parasitic bolt on site in its declarations of sustainability for the sites that the City does
have in its plan.
This is not a complaint about Derby City’s planning process, I have great respect for its spatial
planning team; it is a complaint that my neighbourhood is being subjected to impositions from
plans which appear to reflect a complete absence of cooperation at this critical stage in the plan
making process, which cast doubt on the adequacy of the infrastructure in Derby City’s plan; the
two plans are now inconsistent and do not join together.
Mickleover and its village centre seems to be regarded as an infinite resource to be tapped by
everyone, whether it’s our neighbour reworking its local plan or our neighbour determining some
opportunistic planning application. Mickleover is basically full and we would like that recognised
and our neighbouring authority’s advances to be dealt with appropriately.
Your sincerely, in frustration, John Huskins