Submissions

Introduction

The process we are following is innovative. Some may question the number of plans that have been shown over the last few months and it is important to recognise that in a normal development process, all the work to date would normally have been done by the developer in private, possibly with a some pre-application discussions with officers, and it would only be at this stage that the plans would become public.  However, because of the process that the Government have set out and also because of our desire for this to be as open as possible, we have gone through this iterative design process in public, we think this has been helpful in devising the plan, but recognise that it has created challenges for people to understand what is being discussed here.

The process we are in is to identify land for an eco-town in a national planning policy statement.  This is not a planning application, however the level of analysis and detail we have gone into far surpasses what would be normal in a spatial allocation process, for example an allocation in a Regional Spatial Strategy.

Since April this year when we found we were on the shortlist, the design process has been about assimilating information from a whole host of areas including; national and regional planning policy and the regional economic strategy, our detailed technical studies, feedback from our full consultation process, studies of the constraints and opportunities presented by the site itself, and our aspirations to deliver something genuinely unique in this area. Through an iterative design process this has been brought together in the Masterplan Vision Document that we submitted to CLG recently, including at its heart the composite masterplan for the site.