PEOPLE in Redditch are to be consulted on the town’s next phase of development.
Everyone who lives or works in Redditch will now be asked to help shape how the area could grow, after councillors at
Monday’s meeting of Redditch Borough Council gave the go-ahead for an ‘issues and options’ planning consultation.
The six-week consultation will start on Thursday (May 22) and will run until July 3, including special community events across the borough at dates and locations to be announced.
It marks the formal start of work to prepare a new Local Plan for Redditch, a key planning document which will set out the strategy to meet the borough’s future needs for housing, employment and infrastructure up to 2043.
Redditch Borough Council Leader and portfolio holder for regeneration and environmental services, Coun Sharon Harvey, said: “Almost six decades on from Redditch’s new town masterplan, this consultation is an early opportunity to shape the next phase of Redditch’s development.
“This is the start of the process, so no development sites are proposed. That is for a later stage. For now, we need your views on the issues we must tackle, and how we propose to approach those issues.”
The consultation sets out background info and broad options for the key planning issues in Redditch and asks for views on them.
Those include growth options, approaches to housing, the economy and the district centres, the borough’s natural and historic environments, the ‘design code’ that will guide how things should look, and climate change.
It also meets a requirement to give landowners and developers the opportunity to submit what they believe are potential development sites, known as the ‘call for sites’.
The council will consider all the responses it receives during the next stage of the process, which will be to draft actual planning policies for another round of public consultation in the future.
This consultation also gives people in Redditch, for the very first time, a digital consultation platform to more easily have their say on the issues and options for local planning, in addition to traditional methods.
Visit www.redditchbc.gov.uk/redditchplan to view the consultation online, and visit the council’s Customer Services at George Walk in the Kingfisher Shopping Centre, Redditch Library, and Woodrow Library for paper copes.
