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Influencing the Bradford Local Plan – Part 2

Andrew Wood
By Andrew Wood

Our work in analysing and commenting on the Local Plan consultation has three components.

Firstly

We’ve invited people from around Bradford District who want to influence the Plan from the perspective of their own community to join a campaign network. We’re helping them to fit their local concerns into the bigger, district-wide picture and strengthen its technical credentials; and they’re helping CPRE to make sure we can use on-the-ground local knowledge to inform our response. If you’re interested in joining this campaign network, please get in touch through our contact form or twitter @cprewestyorks.

Secondly

We’re looking at the big, strategic policies in the Plan, which set out what the Plan aims to achieve overall – how much development, how it is to be distributed around the district, and what outcomes the Council hopes that will have (eg supporting job creation, supplying houses, reducing road traffic). Our full Strategic Policies Analysis is available here – it shows how we’re planning to answer each of the questions in the consultation, and you’re welcome to plunder it for your own submissions.

Thirdly

We’re working through as many of the proposed site allocations as we can to identify the campaign hotspots – places where a change to the plans proposals could make a difference to the outcomes we want to see. We’ll be posting these on the website as we go. It may not be possible for us to post all of these before the consultation deadline, but if you can see how we’re approaching the issues in one hotspot you may be able to use a similar approach for your own.

Reasonable Alternatives?

A really important part of the Preferred Options (Regulation 18) stage of consultation is that the Plan needs to show how it has considered and assessed ‘reasonable alternatives’ to the policies it proposes. Looking at the big concerns we highlighted in Part 1 – climate action, making the best use of land through brownfield priority and increased densities, and addressing inequalities – we believe there is a serious gap in the draft Plan. While it has correctly identified some of the really big challenges, and is particularly strong on policies for sustainable transport, it has completely sidestepped the issue of considering alternatives. 

Therefore, a big part of our response to the consultation will be to show that there is an alternative and – crucially – it would more clearly get to grips with climate, densities and inequalities. This will form our manifesto for the Bradford Plan. We hope that the local groups in our campaign network will then be able to work with us as we go into the future stages of the Local Plan process, so our manifesto should give us a consistent message and a clearer influence.

We will be posting more details about our alternative vision for the Bradford Local Plan shortly…

Burley-in-Wharfedale
Burley-in-Wharfedale