Good afternoon,
If you’ve attended any number of events or meetings with me, you’ll know that I see you – our local community, residents, businesses, politicians and adjoining boroughs – as incredibly important partners and stakeholders within the Old Oak and Park Royal area.
Many of you have shown your commitment to engaging with the future plans for the area in a number of ways: attending events, visiting the 3D model and submitting your responses to the draft Local Plan and Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL) consultations throughout 2016.
Your feedback has kept our Planning Team busy categorising all the responses and subsequently preparing them for the second draft Local Plan, ready to go out to public consultation later this year.
As both are key planning policy documents for the OPDC area, it’s important that our incoming Chair has time to be briefed on the contents of these documents, so the exact dates are yet to be confirmed.
You said, we did…
We believe that the participation of local people and businesses in the planning, regeneration and development of Old Oak and Park Royal is central to the future success of the area.
So when you told us that you didn’t feel developers were engaging with you effectively, we took it on board and have now strengthened this requirement in our Statement of Community Involvement (SCI). This is a legal document that developers need to adhere to. As we want our SCI to exceed the statutory requirements, we will be asking for better consultations with the community before a developer can submit their planning application to OPDC.
In addition, developers will need to submit a report to OPDC outlining the feedback they received during their consultation period, how the community has influenced the plans and explain why other suggestions could not be implemented.
You can read our updated SCI online.
Dates for your diaries:
March/April 2017
The process of appointing a new Chair is currently underway and after this appointment is made we’ll let you know.
From late Spring and Summer 2017
This next phase, known as Regulation 19 for the draft Local Plan and Regulation 16 for CIL, is expected to commence later this year.
We will be in touch to let you know the exact dates and what activities will be taking place for the public consultation once a full plan is developed and agreed.
With best wishes,
Victoria Hills
Chief Executive Officer
#LondonIsOpen
