Whiteshill and Ruscombe Parish Council meet and drinks

Recycling up in the District: still a way to go!

Well as noted in the last blog I went along to the Parish Council on Thursday - the first 90 minutes was discussing planning issues with Head of Planning and Chief Exec from the District Council. A number of issues raised including concerns about a new planning application locally - more of that in another blog....

As the time of the meeting was spent discussing planning my feedback to the Parish was shorter than usual but covered a number of issues...particularly the results of Local Plan consultation. The council has provisionally agreed the number of houses that should be built over the duration of the Local Plan and the next step is to agree where they should go.

The Local Plan, formerly known as the Core Strategy, will hopefully be submitted to Government inspectors in summer next year and will identify key locations in the district for new housing and jobs until 2031. Under the current proposals these growth areas will take between 2,725 and 4,960 new homes and facilitate the creation of complementary jobs - the good news locally is that the Ruscombe Valley is not listed as a key site but Callowell still remains in the report as an option - the consultation showed huge opposition to both those sites. Although we are still a long way from stopping such crazy developments....the report is a half inch thick wad of papers - available on SDC's website - and has the full results of the consultations....not easy times ahead in terms of decisions....

Anyway the evening finished with drinks and various incredibly tasty snacks brought in my councilors to celebrate the season.....very nice indeed.