The purpose of the Neighbourhood Development Plan is to express the views of the Community.
The Neighbourhood Development Plan…
- has real legal weight, equivalent to that of the Wiltshire Local Plan,
- will provide the planning strategy for Bratton Parish Council
Having a Plan results in an increased payment to the Parish by developers.
Not having a NDP would makes it more difficult to object to speculative Planning Applications or ‘out of character’ buildings in Bratton.
The NDP is therefore produced using a pre-defined, painstaking and lengthy process…
To achieve this, a detailed project plan has been developed to manage and track the work illustrated in the schematic.
With reference to that schematic, we are currently (Autumn 2023) in the iterative ‘draft and refine phases’. The project plan breaks this down into the following topic areas:
- development sites
- views, design and character assessment
- green spaces
- infrastructure inc getting around and economy
Each topic area has different milestones, owners, dependencies and timescales. All topic areas need to be complete before we the Neighbourhood Plan can be considered complete, and there is a risk than an external dependency could affect the timing of milestones. One such external dependency is the ongoing development and consultation of the new Wiltshire Local Plan which sets the context within which the Bratton Neighbourhood Plan should fit.
Considering this we anticipate the first draft of the Bratton Neighbourhood Plan, with consistent policies, will be complete around end April 2024.
From there the project plan highlights the various review and approval steps required to formally sign off the neighbourhood plan. This culminates in the Community Referendum which we hope will take place in April 2025, assuming the other consultations and independent examinations are successful