Neighbourhood Plan Update
Published: 18 July 2024
The Boston Spa Parish Council has set up a Neighbourhood Planning Advisory Group (NPAG) to review our existing Neighbourhood Plan – to bring it up to date to address modern challenges. A Neighbourhood Plan is a document which sets out local planning policies for our neighbourhood. These policies are used by Leeds City Council when determining planning applications.
Since the creation of the original Plan the world has changed a lot – socially and economically – and in ways that people work and travel, and in their views and priorities about housing and development, etc. A revised Plan would allow us to bring the existing Plan up to date and set out how we want our locality to develop over the next decade.
So far, the NPAG has been meeting regularly to discuss the effectiveness of our current Neighbourhood Plan. Subsequently, we have undertaken two face to face consultation events – one at the Village Hall (late Autumn, 2023) and the other at the Deepdale Centre (mid Winter, 2023). There has also been an ongoing digital consultation via the Parish Council website and members of the NPAG also set up a stall on Saturday 13th July, 2024 at the Village Festival in order to engage even more local people in conversations about the Plan.
We have received hundreds of comments so far and all have been added to a data base so that they can be easily analysed.
In order to capture the views of some local children, we asked the teachers at St Mary’s C of E Primary school to ask children what would make ‘An Even Better Boston Spa’ – (the strapline we are using in our consultation exercise), and to show us their ideas in picture form.
We had lots and lots of wonderful, creative and above all, highly relevant and important ideas presented to us which we displayed at our Village Festival stall.
It was lovely to see the adults and children, whether from St Mary’s or not, considering the ideas and deciding which they liked best. And it allowed us to engage with some of the adults and older young people on the day to find out a bit more about what they saw as being important in the development and growth of the village.Given the degree of interest in the existing Plan and the number of responses to our consultation exercises we firmly believe that we have popular support for this work, and now need to get down to doing it.
If you would like to be involved in any way in helping us shape the revised Neighbourhood Plan please get in touch with us (gail.bowen@bostonspapc.org.uk).
We need local people with local knowledge and ideas, and a willingness to give us a bit of their time to progress this work and make it a success – and a successful plan will translate into an ‘Even Better Boston Spa’ for us all to enjoy, with your help and support.