Update From Local Plan Committee

Good morning Bearley,

I wanted to give a quick update on where we are with the South Warwickshire local plan.

There's no real news but there has been lots of activity. We recently communicated with councillors and the press about the threat that the Bearley Wilmcote proposal would create for Stratford itself. The planning teams face real problems, and in all of these the fate of our villages won’t seem that large. But what they should care about, and what we think they do care about, is the future of Stratford itself.

Now that the latest call for sites could put even more potential houses in our area, yes possibly more than 6,800, a new Bearley Wilmcote development could have more than half the number of people that live in Stratford itself. This clearly would overwhelm the already stretched infrastructure - has anyone tried going down the Birmingham Road this week – it would make Stratford a much less attractive place for visitors, threatening up to 1/3 of the jobs in the town which are based on tourism, and just lead to massive gridlock in a place we all love. We've had really good responses from councillors and below you'll see a great article that our friends at Wilmcote got in the Stratford Observer.

The next step in the process is for the council to publish a summary of the consultation responses they received earlier this year. We had hoped this would come out this summer, leading to the next consultation stage starting in December. It now looks likely that both these dates will be put back, with the summary of the last consultation not coming out until the autumn and the next consultation on the shorter list of sites not happening till something like February next year. We still don’t know if we will be in that list – but are doing all we can to reprove us from the shortlist!

As a result of these dates moving back, we're going to delay the next all village meeting that we had planned for the summer. There’s no point in getting everyone together until we have more information. Will let you know as soon as we can about a date for that meeting.

All the best and have a great summer.

Guy Esnouf