Guidance on how to respond to Winchester City Council’s
Your Place Your Plan Consultation (www.localplan.winchester.gov.uk)
Introduction
Winchester City Council’s (WCC) Local Plan consultation “Your Place Your Plan” runs between 15th February and 12th April 2021. We urge you to make your views known before the 12th April deadline. The Save South Winchester Campaign Group (SSWCG) have been looking carefully at the content of the draft plan and the consultation questions. We echo the Council’s call for as many people to make their views known as possible, although a lengthy draft plan, with 12 accompanying documents, makes understanding and responding to the many questions in the consultation a complex task.
The SSWCG believes that none of the four housing options presented under “Homes for All” offers the best choice, and two of them include the risk of large-scale development on greenfield land south of Winchester. Our petition attracted more than 5000 signatures and the campaign counts 1300 Facebook followers who share concerns about such potential development. We believe there is a preferable and more sustainable 5th option for housing which would avoid this, and we urge WCC to consider this option.
As announced at our virtual demo on 28th February, we offer detailed guidance now published on our website to help you respond. We have tried to get to the essence of what a local plan should be, which is how to deliver sustainable new development. Our guidance offers the following three options for you to respond depending on the time you have available
How to make your views known to Winchester City Council
1. Email/letter: The simplest and quickest for many of you will be to send your comments on Homes for All/Green Belt by email or by letter to WCC’s Strategic Planning department.
2. Online consultation (brief) answering the key questions only: Answer Question 1 of “Homes for All”; and Question 3 of “Biodiversity and the Natural Environment” in the on-line consultation.
3. Online consultation (full) Complete more or all of the sections in the on-line consultation (we have added some thoughts here too)
Guidance on how to take one of these approaches is outlined in the guidance document on our Save South Winchester website www.sswcg.co.uk
Good luck
The Save South Winchester Team