South Lakeland Local Plan Review - Issues and Options Consultation 2021

Overview

What is the Local Plan Review?

South Lakeland District Council is reviewing the Local Plan for South Lakeland, which applies to the areas of the district outside of the National Parks.

Our Local Plan carefully considers the housing and the economic growth that our area needs to continue to thrive, while also protecting our local and historic character, special landscapes and environment. It allocates sites for housing and other developments, such as new employment sites, and contains the policies that we use to decide whether to grant planning permissions for new development.

Our current Local Plan has been in place for a number of years, but it needs to be reviewed regularly to make sure it continues to meet the challenges facing our area. In particular we need to ensure that it helps deliver the Council’s strong commitment to action on climate change and biodiversity.

We started reviewing our Local Plan in early 2020. We asked people how they saw the future of South Lakeland, what they thought was important in planning for the next 20 years and which parts of our Local Plan needed to change.

Issues and Options Consultation

Building on what people told us during the consultation in 2020, and further research we have undertaken, we’re now at what we call the ‘Issues and Options’ stage.  We’re still at an early stage of the review and need your views before the draft plan is drawn up. So everything in the Issues and Options report is for discussion and nothing is decided.

At this stage we present some of the key issues in planning for future development in South Lakeland. We set out a number of options and approaches on how the new Local Plan might address the issues and ask your views on them.

For example we set out options for how new development might respond to the climate crisis, and options for how many homes we think need to be built, and options for managing change in our town centres.

The plan has to deal with many different issues and there are many choices to make. To make it easier to understand, we’ve split the main Issues and Options report into a number of chapters covering different topics or ‘themes’. It’s important to note that the topics are all linked together and some issues such as climate change run all through the document.

Get Involved

This online survey is seeking your views on the questions set out in our Issues and Options Report.

You can view the Issues and Options report by clicking through to the online survey and you can also read the main Issues and Options report and a range of supporting documents on our website.

You can also visit our Virtual Consultation Room to view our Issues and Options exhibition boards and welcome video. These boards provide a brief introduction and summary of the main report.

Why your views matter

We are consulting at this stage of our Local Plan Review as we want to hear people’s views on the possible options and approaches before we prepare the draft Local Plan for further consultation.

Effective engagement is an essential part of preparing Local Plans to ensure that everyone can share their views and local knowledge, and help inform the content of the Local Plan.

We will be engaging with local communities throughout the Local Plan review process over the next few years. Details of all our future consultations, and how to get involved, can be found on our website at www.southlakeland.gov.uk/LocalPlanConsultations 

What happens next

We will review all the response recieved during the Issues and Options consultation and use these to inform a draft Local Plan. We will publish all the submitted responses on this survey page. We will also publish a Consultation Statement. This will summarise the responses that have been made and explain how we have taken them into account in preparing the draft Local Plan.