WELCOME TO FELSTED

The Felsted Neighbourhood Plan – Pre-Submission Draft is now available via the Neighbourhood Plan Website.

The Neighbourhood Plan Steering group has invested a huge amount of their own time to help the Parish establish a Plan and we all owe them a debt of gratitude for the work they have undertaken.

The Plan will set out how the community wish to see Felsted develop over the coming 15 years, including for important local facilities like the doctors’ surgery, taking important aspects of local control, rather than leaving the process in the hands of developers and the Uttlesford Local Plan.

Every household will receive a summary document through the post. In addition, the full document can be read online or in selected locations around the Parish. Details are on the Neighbourhood Plan site.

Please read the full news item on the Neighbourhood Plan site, where you can submit comments via the “Survey Monkey” link.

The Uttlesford Local Plan has now reached the final consultation stage before it is reviewed by the Government Inspector.

The full plan can be read here.

You can submit your comments here. The consultation closes at 5pm on 13 August 2018.

The points which Felsted Parish Council believe are important are:

West of Braintree development

The proposal for a 13,000 house new town, straddling Uttlesford and Braintree districts, has been found unsound by the Government Inspector in his review of the Braintree District Local Plan (as part of the North Essex Garden Partnership). See our earlier new item here.

Despite this, Uttlesford (UDC) has decided to keep the smaller part of the proposed development in its plan. This would result in up to 3,500 houses being built in Uttlesford, to the north of Felsted, approximately 1000 of which would be in the current plan period.

Felsted Parish Council remains against this development and believes that it is unsustainable. 

House building in Felsted Parish

Felsted is identified as a type A village and is expected to accept  a share of the 14,000 planned houses for the coming 15 years. There are 2 sites identified by Uttlesford in our Parish for development in the plan period, totalling up to 70 houses. Full details can be read in the regulation 19 document on page 203 onwards.

Land north of Station Road for 40 houses.

Land east of Braintree Road for 30 houses.

It should be noted that the Felsted Neighbourhood Plan, which will conditionally support some housing in Felsted during the 15 year Plan period, where community benefit can be realised, is in the final stages of completion prior to public consultation in the coming weeks.  This will be delivered to every house in summary form, and be available to view in detail online and at a number of locations, before the closing date of the Local Plan consultation. This will enable parishoners to view and consider the 2 plans alongside each other.

Stansted airport

Following our concerns that UDC’s position regarding Stansted airport was lacking in support for the communities impacted by the airport, your Parish Council has worked with our District Councillors to ensure that the Plan wording was more appropriate.

The Plan wording was rewritten and Felsted Parish Council now supports UDC in the Plan statements, taking a firm position in relation to representing the concerns of communities overflown by planes, and in taking a clear position against any increase in night flights.

Current plans for 10,000 new homes under the Garden Community (GC) principle, located to the north of Felsted, have been declared ‘unsound’ by the Government’s Inspector of Local Plans.

Felsted Parish Council has argued against the plans, primarily on the grounds of lack of facilities and infrastructure, and the impact on Felsted from traffic heading south from the new town and into the wider local road network.

In his letter, link here, the inspector lays out his reasons for the rejection:

‘It will be evident from the foregoing discussion that I consider that the Garden Community proposals contained in the Plan are not adequately justified and have not been shown to have a reasonable prospect of being viably developed.  As submitted, they are therefore unsound…’

‘… on the basis of the evidence I have considered so far I would advise that simultaneously bringing forward three GCs on the scale proposed in the submitted Plan is likely to be difficult to justify.’

‘Option 1 would be for the NEAs to agree to remove the GC proposals from the Section 1 Plan at this stage, and commit to submitting a partial revision of Section 1 for examination by a defined time, for example within two or three years.’

‘I expect that this letter will come as a disappointment to the NEAs after all the hard work and resources they have committed to bringing the Section 1 Plan forward for examination.  Nonetheless, I hope it will be appreciated that my findings do not necessarily represent a rejection of their commendable ambitions for high-quality, strategic-scale development in North Essex.  Equally, however, the scale of those ambitions, and the long timescale over which any GC proposals would come forward, require that adequate time and care are taken now to ensure that any proposals are realistic and robust.’

This rejection of the Plan submitted by the North Essex Garden Community (NEGC) group, on behalf of the District Councils,  will also impact the  ‘West of Braintree’ new town element of Uttlesford’s Local Plan, currently in the final stages of development.

It is unclear at this stage how the District Councils will respond to the Inspector’s report and whether or not they intend to follow his guidance to remove the new town proposals from their Plans.

We will continue to follow progress, as the plans could still come forward, and will object where we believe there are inappropriate and poorly planned new town developments.