Authority Monitoring Report 2020 to 2021

We are required by legislation to have a new Buckinghamshire-wide Local Plan in place by April 2025.

This Local Plan will cover the whole of the Buckinghamshire Council area, for the period up to 2040. It will be part of the development plan.

In August 2020 the Government published a Planning White Paper which proposed very significant reform of the planning system, including plan-making. What we will need to say in the Plan will rely on further detail that the Government will provide in the form of new laws, policy and guidance.

We have made progress on a number of specific tasks that we judge to be low-risk – see below.

Our ‘Brown before Green’ pledge means that we are committed to prioritise using previously developed land (brownfield sites) wherever we can to help reduce the need to build on greenfield sites. Greenfield sites are sites that have not previously been built on.

We have now invited people twice to send us their suggestions for land that could be re-used.

The first time, we invited suggestions between 16 February and 6 April 2021.

The Council received 275 site submissions through this call for sites exercise. We discounted a number of sites because they:

• were duplicates
• are greenfield sites or in agricultural use
• have planning permission or are committed in a Local Plan
• have a pending planning application

Analysis of the remaining sites shows that 185 are brownfield and 28 sites are partly brownfield.

This analysis is the first step in working out whether development of the sites can happen, and how much could be built on them.

Our second call started on 6 December 2021 and we are leaving this call open to make sure there is plenty of opportunity for people to register these sites with us.

Between 29 November 2021 and 11 February 2022, we ran a ‘Discovery and Exploration’ survey to find out issues for the Plan and discover more about people’s ambitions across the Council area.

The Council:

• issued a press release at the start of the consultation
• wrote directly to over 2000 stakeholders, including public bodies and organisations on our consultation database asking them to take part in the consultation. This included Town and Parish Councils where they were asked to share the survey with their parishioners
• advertised the consultation on our website, through Your Voice Bucks which is the Council’s joint consultation portal
• provided printed copies of the surveys and posters to public libraries, and information for local GP surgeries
• included an article about the survey in the Council’s residents’ update for the whole of the Council area
• gave presentations to the Bucks and Milton Keynes Association of Local Councils (BALC) and at developer, architects and agent forums during January 2022
• reached pupils and parents through the Council’s schools’ bulletin
• led a social media campaign which reached a wide audience on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn
• sent a letter to Buckinghamshire MPs and the Council’s Deputy Leader took part in a radio interview about the Engagement with Wycombe Sound in December 2021

We are now taking a close look at the feedback and will be reporting separately on the main issues that came up. We will use this information to help us understand important issues facing Buckinghamshire and we will need to consider how to address them as we start to prepare the Local Plan for Buckinghamshire.