Last night was a Policy Panel at Stroud District Council - a sort of training come consultation thing that gets councillors up to speed on a number of issues - last night there were three and I have to say the last raised many concerns for me...Photo: Love this shot of windows along the Whiteshill Main Road
First up was a presentation on the Strategic Flood Risk Assessment - lots of interesting stuff - the papers are on the District's website here - what surprised me is when I asked about the 1 in 20 year or 1 in 100 year flood predictions and I learnt that these do not include Climate Change - a separate set of maps is produced for them - also on the website - I need to look at this more - clearly new planning applications now need to take account of all factors so there is an improvement - but despite flood and drought being two sides of the same coin the Government has not considered drought at all in this assessment - when are they going to wake up to understanding even basic issues of sustainability - it is scary and shameful!!! I could write lots more but that'll do for now.
Next up came the Core Strategy which we will all hear lots more about as this in March as this plan is the one we need to put in place for the future - it covers many aspects from environmental policy to housing - including the absurd Government targets of increasing housing in the District by 4,500 or whatever each year!! Anyhow I will return to that - you can see the Green councillors opening statement from last year on this here. This is a real opportunity to make Stroud more sustainable so it will need many of us to contribute.
And lastly the new planning permitted development rights - download these at:
www.stroud.gov.uk/info/householder_permitted_development_rights.pdf
Words almost fail me with the nonsense of these rulings - they are so unclear that District Councils are going to struggle to interpret - they also give absurd permitted development rights - indeed at times it was laughable - how can these folk even devise such rules without talking to folk who do the job??????
1 comment:
I just read that guidance doc, it really makes very little sense - not least, a lot of the questions depend on the definition of the 'front' of the house, which in an area like this is often not obvious.
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