Firstly, Happy New Year from your Neighbourhood Development Planning team!
As Ivor explained in our last update, we have reached an agreement with West Berkshire Council to complete a non-allocating NDP right away. This means that we won’t need to add any more houses to our plan until 2037, and we’ll be able to finish it faster as a result.
Just to remind you we still believe our NDP will deliver strong benefits to the parish including:
- Our NDP would become part of the West Berkshire Local Plan and therefore our policies must be considered on any proposed development in the parish.
- We will continue to be able to set our policies in line with your desires to help shape the parish in the future.
- When we enact this NDP the CAPC will have more money within our control, to use on local projects
This also means that we can work to shorten timescales. So, if our NDP is accepted by the West Berkshire Council (WBC) and the independent examiner, we should be able to hold our referendum with you, our parish, in October. Although these dates are subject to change, we intend to complete and, if approved by the parish, adopt our NDP this year. We will, of course, keep you fully updated on our progress throughout the year and will gladly answer any questions or address any issues that arise via social media or our website in the usual manner.
Unfortunately, two more members of our NDP team tendered their resignations just before Christmas. Despite this, we intend to continue working with our current team as best we can. We’d like to ask once more if anyone is interested in assisting us in completing our plan, we would be grateful if they let us know. Although we received a lot of support and feedback from you during the parish Open Days, unfortunately, few people have so far stepped forward to volunteer help since then.
Lastly, as we put the finishing touches to our Design, Character and Heritage work we are currently checking if there are any additional ‘key’ assets within the parish that should be noted or included.
We have a list of listed and historical buildings in the parish that are already in the NDP, as well as two nominated ‘new’ assets for consideration. Our ‘master’ list is the national register of historical assets, but before we finish this section, we’re reaching out to all groups and parishioners to see if there are any additional assets they’d like to see nominated from within the parish.
With this in mind could I ask if you have any non-designated heritage nominations (buildings, monuments, sites, places, ‘local interest’ buildings, areas or landscapes identified as having a degree of significance meriting consideration in planning decisions) within the parish that you would like us to consider to please let us know via our website in the normal way?
Many thanks
Pete Murray
Cold Ash Parish NDP Steering Committee