Public Consultation Update
The public consultation was due to close on 22 December, but due to the potential impacts of Covid-19 for individuals and organisations to respond, the Council has now decided that it will consider responses/submissions received up to 5pm on Friday 8 January 2021.
The consultation on the Preferred Approaches (Regulation 18b) for the Local Plan Review has been scheduled for the 1st of December 2020 to the 22nd of December 2020. This is the next stage of informal stakeholder and public involvement in the local plan review process.The consultation document sets out the preferred spatial strategy for future development, proposed amendments to existing strategic and development management policies and new development management policies for the period 2022-2037.
The Local Plan Review – Preferred Approaches document (Regulation 18b) and supporting documents are available to view and download below
Please send us your comments using the consultation portal https://maidstone-consult.objective.co.uk/portal/
Alternatively, you can complete the response proforma and send it to us:
Alternative ways to access the consultation document.
The consultation document also has a read aloud function to assist access to it. This can be used via downloading the document as a PDF and opening it in Adobe Acrobat Reader. Once this has been done click view – read out loud – activate read out loud – then you can choose to read an individual page or the whole document.
A consultation on the Sustainability Appraisal accompanying the Regulation 18b Preferred Approach is running simultaneously.
The Environmental Assessment of Plans and Programmes regulations (2004) requires that all Development Plan Documents are required to be subject to a Sustainability Appraisal. This is reiterated in the National Planning Policy Framework. The Sustainability Appraisal is required to consider and communicate the key sustainability issues and effects of emerging policies and any reasonable alternatives.
The Sustainability Appraisal is an iterative process which runs alongside the development of a plan and informs the ongoing decision-making process. The document being consulted on is a record of the appraisal work carried out to date.
The sustainability appriasal can be viewed here:
The consultation will open on Tuesday 1st December and will close on 5pm Tuesday 22nd December.
All consultation comments will be made publicly available on the consultation portal (https://maidstone-consult.objective.co.uk/portal/) in due course. This is so that interested parties can view all the responses that have been received. Published information will include the comment and responder name. All demographic and contact data will be removed. All data is processed in accordance with the Data Protection Act 2018. The consultation responses will be used to inform the next stages of the Local Plan Review.