Swanick in Amber Valley is England’s first Neighbourhood Plan rejected at referendum after the Parish Council recommended a no vote after they disagreed with the independent examiner – Nigel Mc Gurk’s s report.  They complained it had been ‘gutted‘ and that he had done similar at Alweras were the Parish Council recommended it be withdrawn.  In Swanick the district hadn’t even asked the Parish council or informed them of the referendum date, contrary to the regulations.

Are we dealing with a rogue examiner here – no he was simply doing his job.  Both plans were badly written with large restrictive and unjustified local green space designations  (meeting none of the tests in the NPPF) and no housing allocations.  Swanick capped housing at the bottom of the range of need identified by the district without justification.  Neither plan was positive or proactive.

Both parishes were poorly served by their districts.  The neighbourhood…

Until today the SoS was faced with the unwelcome task of doing local plans him or herself where they dont meet next Aprils deadline

But a new clause is proposed in the Neighbourhood Planning Bill gives default powers to County Councils if they so wish.

There is also a clause for the SoS to order joint plans.

An intriguing clause provides for the SoS to set ‘data standards’ for LDSs and LDDs.

What might these be – limits on pages perhaps?  Word limits?  Possibly numbers for housing overspill from major conurbations maybe.

These cover most of the recommendations of the Local Plan Experts Group.

Quite a lot of interest in the H&C Agency proposal for the government to underwrite the price of unsold homes.

Guardian

A £2bn fund to boost housebuilding could be used by the government to offer guarantees to developers that it will step in to take on properties that they are unable to sell.

The Conservative party unveiled plans on Monday for £5bn worth of funding to support housebuilding, £2bn of which was designed to provide 15,000 new homes on public land by 2020.

The accelerated construction fund, could be used to underwrite new developments on public land, and could mean the government taking on unsold properties, according to Sir Edward Lister, the chairman of the Homes andCommunities Agency (HCA), which will oversee it.

“So it’s about us going to a housebuilder and instead of expecting the normal build-out rate of 50 units a year we’ll say, ‘We want…