Guildford Draft Local Plan: Strategy and Sites Consultation 2014 Statement of Community Engagement
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Guildford Draft Local Plan: Strategy and Sites Consultation 2014 Statement of Community Engagement Prepared for Guildford Borough Council by URS, October 2014 1 Guildford Draft Local Plan: Statement of Community Engagement December 2014 Contents Introduction........................................................................................................................3 What’s the purpose of this document?.............................................................................3 How’s this document structured?.....................................................................................3 Background...................................................................................................................4 What’s a Local Plan?.......................................................................................................4 Why does Guildford need a Local Plan?.........................................................................4 What happens if we don’t have a Local Plan?..................................................................4 What other Local Plan consultations have happened in Guildford?..................................5 Overview of the consultation........................................................................................6 What was our vision for the consultation on the Draft Local Plan 2014?........................6 Who did we consult?........................................................................................................7 When did we consult?......................................................................................................9 How did we consult you on the Draft Local Plan?...........................................................10 Events.............................................................................................................................11 Providing feedback..........................................................................................................15 Measuring success and benchmarking.......................................................................17 Next steps.......................................................................................................................18 How can you stay involved?.........................................................................................18 Appendices..................................................................................................................19 Appendix A: Event overviews...........................................................................................20 Appendix B: List of groups and organisations consulted.................................................38 Appendix C: Consultation materials.................................................................................43 Appendix D: Publicity campaign.......................................................................................74 Appendix E: Glossary.......................................................................................................82 2 Guildford Draft Local Plan: Statement of Community Engagement December 2014 Introduction How’s this document structured? Between July and September 2014, Guildford Borough The document is divided into five sections and we’ve Council consulted on the Draft Local Plan: Strategy and colour coded each one to make it easy to navigate: Sites document. The guiding purpose of this consultation was to reach as many people as possible, to inform Background them about the consultation and encourage them to ask questions, seek information and submit their comments in Throughout response to the Draft Local Plan proposals. Overview of consultation the document we In order to achieve this aim and to fulfil our statutory Measuring success have added requirements set out in Regulation 18 of the Town and signposts. These Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012, we undertook an extensive consultation programme Next steps guide you to more and this report sets out how we did this. Appendices information. What’s the purpose of this document? We’re presenting the findings of the Draft Local Plan consultation in two stages. The first stage (this document) looks at “how did we consult?” It focuses on the steps we took to interact with Who is URS? the Guildford community and our stakeholders over the course of the Draft Local Plan: Strategy and Sites 2014 Guildford Borough Council commissioned URS to assist and support their extensive consultation programme. consultation, including: URS were appointed to help deliver events across the borough. URS provided their planning policy expertise to support council officers in engaging with interested parties including key stakeholders, the general how we undertook the consultation community and harder to reach groups. This report is a reflection of the URS and Guildford Borough Council where and when events were held partnership and the work completed during the consultation period. how many people participated in the consultation and URS is a leading provider of technical services for public and private sector companies worldwide. URS next steps in the development of the Local Plan. offers a full range of project services including: working with local authorities developing evidence bases for local plans; being the UK’s leading provider of Sustainability Appraisals for local plans; and working with the The second stage of the consultation reporting will Planning Advisory Service to provide support to local authorities on issues such as plan viability. be based on “what people said”. We will produce a document which analyses the main issues raised. It is at Our specialist stakeholder engagement team has extensive experience of supporting the successful delivery this second stage where all formal submissions received of a wide range of environment and infrastructure projects across the UK. during the consultation will be analysed and reported on. 3 Guildford Draft Local Plan: Statement of Community Engagement December 2014 Background What’s a Local Plan? A local plan sets out proposed strategies for homes, jobs, transport, infrastructure, services and the environment. The proposals set out in the document are relevant to both our urban and rural communities and can affect the areas where people live, work, shop, play and how they get around. Why does Guildford need a local plan? An increasing number of people live and work in Guildford borough and pressure is growing on local housing, services and infrastructure. The local plan is our strategic response to help meet local needs and the government’s growth agenda – it will set out the vision for the borough and the approach to development between now and 2031. What happens if we don’t have a local plan? It is very important that new homes and places of employment are built in areas where the infrastructure is sufficient to support them, or in areas where enough new infrastructure can be provided. Guildford is a successful and attractive area to live and also appealing for business and education. We want this to continue, but in order for this to happen, we need to ensure that the right strategy is in place and the Local Plan will help us achieve this. Without a local plan, we risk applications and appeals for piecemeal development which may not be accompanied by supporting infrastructure and which may not be of benefit to our borough now and in the future. Therefore, we need to prepare a new local plan so that we can actively manage development across the borough which reflects up to date needs for jobs, homes and infrastructure. 4 Guildford Draft Local Plan: Statement of Community Engagement December 2014 What other local plan consultations have happened in Guildford? For eight weeks in October and November 2013 we consulted on our Strategy and Sites Issues and Options document. During the process over 5,250 local residents, businesses, organisations and developers responded to us, amounting to around 20,000 comments. Feedback gathered during the consultation on the Issues and Options was analysed by the Council and fed into the Draft Local Plan: Strategy and Sites 2014. You can read a full Issues and Options Community Engagement Statement at: www.guildford.gov.uk/ newlocalplan 5 Guildford Draft Local Plan: Statement of Community Engagement December 2014 Overview of the consultation Why did we choose this consultation What was our vision for the consultation on the Draft Local Plan 2014? approach? Our vision was to create a two-way process of sharing information about the Draft Local Plan and listening to We wanted everyone with an interest in the your views. Draft Local Plan to take part in the consultation. We also wanted our approach to align with both We wanted to ensure that we reached as many people as possible. The consultation was therefore designed to: our statutory requirements and what we have committed to as a Council in terms of public be timely, meaningful and inclusive consultation including: promote and raise awareness of the consultation period and the opportunities to have your say achieve a greater level of response from a wider proportion of stakeholders Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) undertake targeted engagement with seldom-heard groups and young people and (England) Regulations 2012 -Regulation 18 involve the local community and listen to their comments. Guildford Community Engagement Strategy (2011) We achieved our vision by going beyond the statutory