No sooner has its existing Local Plan been agreed (in April) than East Cambridgeshire District Council has started the process of revising it again.

The Local Plan is the council’s high-level strategic planning policy document. It sets out the vision, objectives, spatial strategy and policies for the future development of the district. It also identifies land and allocates sites for different types of development, such as housing and employment, to deliver the planned growth for the district – and individual planning applications are judged in the context of whether or not they conform to the Plan. The current Local Plan is online here.

Even before the ink was dry on East Cambs’ Local Plan, however, it was judged deficient. One of the main requirements of the Plan is that it must identify enough land for housing supply for the next five years. When developers Gladmans appealed the council’s refusal to grant them permission for a large development at Witchford this summer, the Inspector ruled that the development should go ahead because the council had failed to demonstrate that five year supply.

So the council is already back to the drawing board and reviewing its Plan all over again.  A timetable was agreed by the council last month, and the process is expected to take around three years, and the new Plan adopted in 2018.  There will be public consultation at different stages of the review.

The council has set up a Working Party to consider some of the issues that will arise during the development of the Plan, and I’m one of the members. It met for the first time last night, and will meet again in mid-December, before Full Council on 7 January is asked to agree the first phase of consultation.

What should be the council’s broad approach for identifying where thousands of extra houses should go over the next 25-30 years? Should they be added to all existing towns and villages in proportion to their size? (Should Sutton accept 4.7% of the extra houses because it has 4.7% of the existing housing in the district?). Should they be predominantly placed in Ely and the larger settlements because they already have better transport and facilities? Should they be mainly placed outside those settlements to balance the large developments that have already taken place there? Are there other possible patterns of distribution?

When the present Local Plan was drawn up, there were additional standards for building that the council could choose to adopt. It could, for example, require more efficient use of water; full-scale disabled access; or low or zero carbon for better energy efficiency. Many of these standards have been swept away by the Government, who said they wanted to encourage more house building by reducing construction costs. Should the council include the few remaining optional standards in its new Local Plan? Or should it choose not to require water and energy efficiency, or homes that will be able to be occupied by people when they become less mobile?

The current Local Plan says that the council wants 30 per cent of development in the north of the district to be ‘affordable’, and 40 per cent in the south. It doesn’t achieve anything like that, and has already watered down that requirement substantially. Will the ‘affordable’ housing figure in the new Local Plan be much, much lower? If so, how will East Cambs provide for those who cannot afford the escalating prices of housing at full market value?