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Local Plan “a deeply flawed document”?

Evidence was offered to the EDDC Extra Ordinary Meeting (28 Jan 2016), by SOS member, Jeremy Woodward, in the following speech:

‘Mr Chairman,
Would you not agree that the Local Plan which you and your colleagues are being asked to adopt is in fact a deeply flawed document?

As an illustration, if I might quote from the submission made by the Vision Group for Sidmouth to the Local Plan on 8th June 2012.

I begin:
“The influence of the East Devon Business Forum on proposals for employment land and housing in the draft Local Plan should be considered. In January 2007, a Sub-Committee was established by the Forum to consider ‘amending the Atkins report’:

To refer to the
“Minutes of the Annual General Meeting of the East Devon Business Forum on 25 January 2007

“Atkins Report:

“Graham Brown reported that he had attended a meeting with the Corporate Director – Environment to discuss the preliminary findings of the Atkins Report. The findings included the conclusion that East Devon did not need as much employment land as [the] East Devon Business Forum had recommended. Forum members discussed how the findings of the Atkins Report would be amended as they were not in step with East Devon’s needs.

“A Sub Committee of the Business Forum would need to investigate employment land availability, where there was potential for growth and where the business community would like to see development take place.”

End of minutes.

It appears that a group of business people comprising this Forum reviewed the publicly-funded [independent] Atkins Report and then determined that the employment land provisions were insufficient; they subsequently proceeded to derive their own projections, which the District Council then adopted as “evidence” for the increased employment land figure which ensued:

To refer to the
“Minutes of the Annual General Meeting of the East Devon Business Forum on 31 January 2008 [a year later]

“Update on Employment Land Issues:

“Members noted that the work the Business Forum had done on the Atkins Report had made an enormous difference to the final report prepared by the Employment Land Issues Task and Finish Forum. This had been accepted by the Executive Board. The report was now being used by the Development Control Committee as a base when considering planning applications for employment land.”

End of quote.

Again, Mr Chairman, would you not acknowledge that the Local Plan is a deeply flawed document?

Because, if we chose to take the Council’s own calculations of one new home to one new job, this deliberate inflation of employment land undermines fundamentally the housing figures proposed in the Local Plan.

Thank you.


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Who bears the responsibility for putting the Sidford employment site into the Local Plan? Hardly the Inspector, says Councillor.

Sidmouth Ward Member, Cllr Cathy Gardner (EDA Ind) made the following speech, at last Thursday’s Extra Ordinary General Meeting:
Adoption of Local Plan, Item 6
“The responsibility for putting the Sidford site into the LP lies squarely with the leaders at EDDC and has done since 2007.
They chose to include the site, based on arguments put forward several years ago by a variety of interested parties. There was no real desire to remove this site from the LP last year, otherwise why was the Planning Officer not instructed to provide evidence for an alternative? Can the Leader explain the purpose of the vote to ‘remove’ the site if it was not purely a vote winning exercise?”

Although the question was specifically addressed to the Leader (Paul Diviani) who was in the room, it was Chief Executive(Mark Williams) who attempted an answer. He said that councillors “in their wisdom” had gone ahead with a late-in-the-day vote to delete Sidford employment land from the Local Plan, despite his own warnings that their action could derail the Inspector’s approval of the whole Plan. There was a strong hint that Councillors should have known that, as the completed Draft Local Plan was already with the Inspector, it was anyway too late for them to make changes.


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EDDC Chief Executive blames Sidmouth for Local Plan delay!

Tempers flared at the (28 Jan 2016) Extra Ordinary Meeting at Knowle, culminating in a quite extraordinary accusation from Mark Williams,CEO. “People from outside Sidmouth say that, but for Sidmouth, we would have had a Local Plan a few years ago”, he said. To loud calls from the astonished public, of “Shame!” and “Not True!” he continued his vitriol, with even more bizarre logic, apparently aimed equally at the East Devon Alliance. “I’m sure I’m not the only one who sees the irony that the end result of all your objections is that we’ve ended up with a Local Plan with more houses than originally proposed”, he said.

And courtesy again went by the board, with Mr Williams infuriating Save Our Sidmouth spokesperson, Richard Eley by calling his comments about the Inspector’s decision on Sidford Fields “churlish”. The CEO even went as far as to say that Mr Eley had called the Inspector “idiotic”, and was steadfastly shielded by the Chair (Stuart Hughes), from making an apology. Mr Eley retorted angrily, “I did not use that word”.
The senior council officer’s outbursts, and what Mr Eley actually said (when referring to the “undemocratic” decision” to keep the Sidford Employment land), can be listened to on the EDDC website, where the officers’ Code of Conduct can also be found http://new.eastdevon.gov.uk .