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The public 'hearing' is quite soon.
Final stages of draft Wiltshire Housing Site Allocations Plan due this spring.
Plans for the supply of land for future housing will be reviewed at examination hearings this spring.
The draft Wiltshire Housing Site Allocations Plan proposes to allocate new sites for housing and to maintain a five-year housing land supply in each of Wiltshire’s three Housing Market Areas of Chippenham, Trowbridge and Salisbury up to 2026.
Housing growth is a government priority and all local authorities must prepare plans to identify sites for development. The plan builds on the framework already provided by the long-term Wiltshire Core Strategy, which details an over-arching planning policy and the overall principles for development in Wiltshire.
Much of the housing growth for Wiltshire has already been identified and the proposed plan brings forward further sites, designed to ensure the scale of growth is appropriate for Wiltshire and is managed and directed in the most sustainable locations.
The plan along with the council’s Schedule of Proposed Changes will now be examined in public by an inspector from 2 April 2019 at the Civic Centre in Trowbridge.
The inspector has published the agenda for the public hearing sessions, along with a list of matters and questions that will be used to examine the soundness of the plan. The matters and questions focus on key aspects of the plan including the evidence that has been prepared to support the proposed housing allocations.
One such matter addresses the need for infrastructure, such as schools, to support new development. The recently released statistics on birth rates in the Trowbridge area show the two schools already planned for the Ashton Park development will help cater for numbers in the coming years. A third school, which was originally proposed for the Elm Grove area of Trowbridge, will no longer be required as the two new schools and extensions to existing schools will meet the need for the future. This will now be reported to the inspector in advance of the hearing sessions.