Public consultation on PINS 'model policy' prior to submission - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

Can I ask why you are doing this now rather than wait until the Examination and bundle it with the other main mods you may/will have to make? It seems to me that you are doubling your work at the least.

We're in the run up to examination hearings and our Inspector has advised us to publish and consult on main mods, including the PIST policy before the hearings, potential consultation fatigue (on all sides) notwithstanding. It may be that he doesn't anticipate the need for further significant changes (I'm an optimist!).

Probably of no real help to you, but I would be interested to know what process LPAs have gone through, where the inspector has thrown this policy at them at examination, as happened in the early days? We're they required to go out and consult on something they were given no choice about? That would be a nonsense wouldn't it? And a complete waste of public money. Hobson's choice is what it's called I think. It would be a bit like being told it's got to be printed in the English language and then going out to consult on people's opinion of doing so.

We have just completed an Examination on an AAP and have been asked to include this policy. There were 3 days of hearing sessions and at each session the Inspector asked the participants to consider the policy and raise any comments / issues there and then. She clearly felt this was a reasonable / proportionate alternative to full consultation. It raised few comments as people were rather confused by it or a little alarmed! We are due to publish a small set of proposed modifications in the next few weeks, which will include this policy and some explanatory text written by ourselves. All comments recieved will be sent to the Inspector and it will be up to her to consider what the outcome is. We are not particularly happy about the inclusion of this policy, it seems completely out of place but the strong message was that is non-inclusion was not an option. Does this help at all.

Slightly off on a tangent, but some planning authorities are altering this policy, for example Taunton Deane, prior to inserting it. Aspects of the policy would seem to me to suggest the LPA has a duty to facilitate development at any price, for example "always work proactively with applicants" - even the chancers in the green belt? Further in the same paragraph there is a reference to "proposals can be approved wherever possible" - with no reference directly to the need for environmental, social and economic sustainability. The ethos of localism suggests it is quite acceptable for the LPA to adapt the policy to be locally relevant, do people know of other examples where this has happened?

Thanks for the comments. We are having to go out anyway in advance of submission with a 'focused change' (deleting one of our key allocated sites due to literally a last-minute objection from Natural England), and thought it might be sensible to consult on the 'model policy' at the same time, to save on consultation costs. However, the likelihood is that there will be a further round of consultation at the end of the EiP, so maybe we could include it in this? Roger, I think almost all planning officers would agree with you. The story that I heard was that one of the Planning ministers instructed PINS to ensure that the model policy was included in all DPDs, perhaps (my interpretation) as a pro-growth sop to the Treasury? Would have been a lot easier just to include it in the NPPF (although of course then it would only have been a material consideration, rather than part of the development plan!).