Some Just Space activity is at the level of individual London boroughs of which there are 33, helping people to participate at the right time when local borough policy is created. Neighbourhood planning is also part of Just Space work in some areas.
Borough planning policy is in documents with various names (Borough Plans or ‘Core Strategies’ for example) and these are now known collectively as “the Local Plan”.
There are borough-wide policies as well as local area policy.
Find your borough planning policy on your borough website by searching words such as planning policy, planning strategy, local plan, core strategy. All changes to local plans have to be the subject of consultation.
As well as the 32 boroughs and the City of London, the two Development Corporations set up under Boris Johnson also have the job of preparing a Local Plan, though the LLDC will loose its planning powers shortly and they will revert to Newham and the other boroughs in the area.
This section of the web site is being treated as a kind of scrap book of advice and experirnces contributed by Just Space groups in 2023. Our hope is that this material may be helpful to others and that someone will find the time to synthesise this into an advisory document.
Local Plan advice
There was a 2023 Government consultation of the future of Local Plans – see here: https://www.gov.uk/government/consultations/plan-making-reforms-consultation-on-implementation (Robin Brown, Hayes)
There are various advisory documents listed and linked on the Planning Aid London website. I searched for Local Plan and got some results including from law firms
The GLA now maintains a useful listing of boroughs with their Local Plan status / progress.
https://www.london.gov.uk/programmes-strategies/planning/implementing-london-plan/local-plans-and-general-conformity-london-plan/local-plans-status-map
Experience from Hackney
I’ve been through a Hackney Local Plan process twice now, the first time accompanied by Richard, for which many thanks to him. Lucy also participated in that one. That was where Richard and I first realised that Britannia Leisure Centre was down for demolition and replacement by ‘housing’. It was tucked away in the Site Allocation Local Plan for 2013.
That discovery was to result in 2016 in the Save Britannia Leisure Centre campaign, which is still ongoing even though they got their way and demolished the leisure centre, which would have cost £17 million max to fully refurbish (council figures). In the process they cut down 60 trees. The hugely expensive ‘Britannia Project’ consists of much concrete – a replacement leisure centre on the local park, an academy school that wasn’t needed, and, about to start, the housing element it was really all about: 371 units, only 51 of them social rented and 30 shared ownership, three towers 10, 20 and 25 storeys high.
The council is the developer and hopes to make an eventual profit from selling the market units abroad. But will they? The final balance sheet is uncertain in this big speculative scheme, which will result in at least three more years of noise, dust and vibrations for local people – and for the academy school which is right next to the site.
I was the only community participant for most of the sessions of the examination in public of the current plan, the second one I have been to. In fact, apart from council officers, there was hardly anyone else there.
Participating in local plans has made me feel like Cassandra, prophesying doom but never to be believed, or even mostly heard. But all the same I would rather know, and do my best to pass on what I found out. If more people participated it could act as a check on the plans of councils and their ‘development’ agendas. (Pat Turnbull)
Experience from the London Legacy Development Corporation local plan process
Just Space worked with London Tenants Federation supporting a number of local groups in making representations. The submission local groups made to the LLDC is at https://justspace.org.uk/2015/03/01/london-legacy-development-corporation-local-plan-scrutinised-starting-this-week
There are additional comments in the compiled evidence which Just Space submitted to the London Assembly Planning and Regeneration Committee in 2022 JustSpace.org.uk/MDC
Experience from the Old Oak and Park Royal DC
to follow
Experience from Ealing
Current in 2023: consultations on a draft local Plan.
The first consultation for Ealing’s Local Plan was January 2019, see attached??. There has been some consultation with residents, but no real engagements. No Ward or “Town” meetings (Ealing is now run as seven “towns”) have been held since 2019. It appears that Ward councillors were not consulted about their wards or had sight of the Plan until the Draft went public under Section 18 at the end of November 2022, and they were given hard copies. Hard copies were left in our remaining libraries, but cost about £45.00, I think, for residents to purchase.
Without going into detail, I will list some of the issues we have had with the Local Development Plan meetings, poor communication on the consultation itself will follow :
Residents have not been encouraged to attend the Local Development Plan Advisory Committee (LDPAC) meetings.
i. The meetings appear on the council website in the calendar of meetings. Missed opportunity in that they are not promoted in Around Ealing a quarterly magazine delivered through every door. The meetings could also be promoted through resident and tenant associations.
ii. To ask a question at an LDPAC meeting a resident has to register and send in the question three days before the meeting, Democratic Services do not like a resident to register to ask a question but reserve the right to ask a question based on the presentations. Community question time comes at the end of the meeting, it is dependent on how long the presentation and questions from the councillors take, as to the time allowed for questions from the floor.
iii. The papers for the meeting (see July 2023) often run to 400 pages, are poorly written, not read by the councillors who attend the meeting and probably only read by the very few “usual suspects”.
Iv The officer’s PowerPoint presentations – for it is usually the same person, contain almost the same amount of text as the papers and each line is read out; it is very difficult not to doze off!
v. The meetings are poorly administered in that the papers from the March meeting were not available for signing off at the July meeting. This s not unusual.
To follow:Notes on
The Draft Local Plan Section 18 documents – some 60 documents and over 12,000 pages was published in late December. A number of important documents were missing including: Detailed workings underpinning the 40,714 units identified in the Spatial Options work, 5-year housing land supply, housing trajectory, Public Open Space table, SINC reports, S106 report.
Shaping Ealing Questionnaire – the council has used this as an evidence base, however the questionnaire does not mention the Local Plan in the questionnaire.
In person events which took and are still taking place from June 2022 or do you mean 2023??. Many are held during the working day.
New documents appearing in the LP, such as the Local Development Scheme July 2023 and the Gypsy and Traveller pitch consultation July 2023, without any notification, we came across both of these by accident, there are probably others we have missed.
There is no project manager or professional comms person for this large important piece of work. An officer, who has attended a civic design and communications course at UCL?, is being held back by her superiors.
It could have been managed far better. (Libby Kemp, Better Ealing)