MAKING decisions about balancing how we plan for homes and businesses for future generations, while protecting and enhancing our local environment, is never easy.    

That’s why the Basingstoke and Deane Local Plan is such an important document and why updating it has, rightly, been the subject of much debate among councillors.

Once adopted, it will guide where new development goes, as well as all planning decisions in the borough, for the next two decades.

READ MORE: Residents to finally have a say on local plan update as consultation plans go ahead

Giving the people who live and work here the chance to have their say on it has been a key ambition for us since we took over control of the council in May last year.

This is such an important milestone for our borough and, quite rightly, feelings run high about it across our communities.

But the expert advice we have so far says that how many new homes have to be built is still set by central government, even after all of the much-trailed changes to national planning policy guidelines.

One of the challenges we have faced in fighting off speculative applications, on sites that developers chose not us, has been not being able to show that we have five years’ worth of land available for building homes – a government requirement.

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The recent planning policy changes mean that when the borough council gets the draft local plan out for public consultation the requirement reduces to having a four year supply of land available against the five year requirement. This means the success of opportunistic applications at appeal based on land supply could end.

But the protection that this offers only kicks in when we formally start the process of updating the Local Plan by going out to public consultation. That’s one of the reasons why it is so important that we do this as soon as possible.

Quite apart from allowing us to benefit from this protection at appeal, it’s vital that we share our draft plan with local residents and ask for their feedback at this point. The plan does, after all, belong to the people of our borough, not just to us as councillors. We need to hear their voices.

For more information see basingstoke.gov.uk/LPU.