The second draft of the Stevenage and North Herts Area Plan (SNAP) has a few minor variations from the first draft, but retains most of the key features. The plan proposes:

• 1500 houses between North Road, Stevenage and Graveley village (one change is that the houses have been pulled further away from the village, and additional planting added)
• 5000 houses to the North of Great Ashby, either side of the site of the proposed secondary school at Tilekiln
• Green space between the two - a Forster Country Park.
• Three gypsy and traveller sites,  (one at junction 8 of the A1(M), one at Friends Green and one just north east of Chesfield
• A link road running from the North Road junction to the new development, between Graveley and Chesfield.

Council officers are making some final changes and expect the plans to be put before North Herts Cabinet and Stevenage Executive in June and that there will be a public consultation after that.

Graveley, Weston and Great Ashby residents are fighting the proposals. Get in touch if you’d like to help.

Herts County Council’s Development Control Committee has voted to approve the planning application for a school at Tilekiln, behind Merrick Close in Great Ashby.

Since the proposal is contrary to Green Belt policy they now have to refer it to the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government. If he believes that the decision “is of more than local significance” he can “call it in”, in which case there will be a public enquiry held by a planning inspector.

We can increase the chances of this happening if people write to the Secretary of State, asking for the application to be called in.

Anybody can do this by writing to:

The Secretary of State
Department for Communities and Local Government
Eland House
Bressenden Place
London
SW1E 5DU

They should copy their letter to the government’s East of England Office (since this is where the decision is actually made) at:

Planning Casework Team
Government Office for the East of England
Eastbrook
Shaftsbury Road
Cambridge
CB2 8DF

email: PlanningCasework@goeast.gsi.gov.uk

We will be providing some suggestions on the points that you might make in your letters shortly, but it important that these relate to the ”more than local significance” of the proposals. These might include:

• That the proposed school prejudices the consideration of a review of the green belt boundary, required by the Regional Spatial Strategy, currently being considered by North Herts and Stevenage Councils.
• That the County Council failed to adopt a sequential approach in demonstrating that there would no sites that would cause less harm.

You should quote the County Council’s application refernce 1/1349-09 on any correspondence.

You may have seen that Croudace are holding a ‘consultation event’ about a proposal of theirs to build 350 houses on land at the top of Calder Way (Roundwood or NES3). They will be at the community centre between 2.00 and 7.30 pm on Wednesday 10th February.

They have not submitted a planning application yet and, as the land is presently in the green belt, this would be very likely to refused if they did. However, the land they are intending to build on is within the area of the SNAP proposals for Stevenage expansion which so many people responded to last year. Council officers at Stevenage and North Herts are working on options for SNAP development and there will be another consultation later this year.

Do go to make your views known about the Croudace proposals if you can.

Do go to the consultation if you can.

County Council officers have confirmed that, while this application is currently on the agenda for the Development Control Meeting of 2nd March, there are ’several outstanding matters’ and that they expect the application to be withdrawn before then. It may, of course, be re-submitted later.

As there are two major applications in Chesfield Ward - the secondary school at Great Ashby and the waste management site application at Jacks Hill - that are being decided by the County Council’s Development Control Committee, rather than North Herts District’s Planning Committee, I thought it might be useful for people to be able to contact the County Councillors who sit on it. You can see a list of names, and click to see contact details, by following this link.  At the moment, both applications are scheduled to come to the Development Control Committee on March 2nd.

The County Council’s Development Control Committee will make a decision on the plan to move Alleynes secondary school to behind Merrick Close in Great Ashby at a meeting on Tuesday 19th January at 10.00 at County Hall in Hertford. The meeting is open to the public, but only representatives of people presenting petitions will be allowed to speak.

The secretary of state has granted outline planning permission for 3,600 houses to be built on land West of Stevenage. The applications had been with the secretary of state for a long time, while developers submitted more details. The application for 5,000 houses has not been granted.

Since this permission is only outline permission, developers will need to submit a detailed planning application and for this to be granted before they are allowed to start building.

I’ve just learnt that the application to move Alleynes School to Great Ashby won’t be on the agenda of the County Council’s Development Control committee this Friday (18th December) as the report wasn’t ready. If you were planning to go to the meeting the application is now likely to go to the meeting on 19th January at County Hall.

North Herts Planning Committee will still consider the application this Thursday (17th) at 7.30 in the council offices in Gernon Road, Letchworth and will pass their views on to the County Council. North Herts District Councillors are recommending that the council does not object. We will have to wait and see what the councillors on the committee think.

Some of you may have heard of plans to put a waste facility near Little Wymondley and Todds Green. This has come from the Hertfordshire Minerals and Waste Development Framework.  The “Waste Sute Allocations and Preferred Options 2″ document has just been published for consultation by Hrets County Council.  It identifies potential sites for waste management facilities and represents HCC’s preferred options.  The consultation period ends on 18 Dec.The site near Wymondley is within Stevenage Borough and is located in the triangle of land bounded by the A1(M), the railway, and the Wymondley Bypass.  The facilities proposed by the County here are anaerobic digestion / in-vessel composting; waste transfer / materials recovery facility; and inert waste recycling.

You can get the details on the web - www.hertsdirect.org/wasteplanningconsultation 

There is still plenty of time to make your views known on this application! We have now heard that North Herts District Council is likely to consider their response to the Cpounty Council and their planning committee meeting on either 8th October or 12th November. The County Council will not be able to decide the application before NHDC’s response and they are also going to take into account further public consultation and comments made at the public meeting in the community hall in Great Ashby on 22nd September. This means that the likely date for the County Council to decide it is 1st December. The meeting will be in County Hall in Hertford.