THURROCK Council’s lead member for planning and regeneration has made an impassioned plea for local people to get involved in the creation of the borough’s Local Plan.
Cllr Richard Speight was speaking at Wednesday (9 December) evening’s meeting of the cabinet where the “Thurrock Local Plan: Monitoring, Timescales and Engagement Strategy” was being discussed.
He said local people need to get involved at the consultation stage of the plan – if they waited until the plan was agreed, they could be too late to have a meaningful say on specific applications.
Cllr Speight said the Local Plan is “very important in setting the parameters of what we would like Thurrock to look like in years to come; to set the minimum standards of what we expect when building in our community”.
He said: “I have been very clear in my tenure as portfolio holder and beyond when I was on the planning committee – how important it is we bring the community into this process because there are decisions here that fundamentally affect the future of this borough.
“Residents have to be a partner in these decisions they can’t just be a bystander.”
He said workshops were planned for younger people, there will be some “residents’ forum work” to help “highlight some of the constrained choices we have”, and there will be a focus on business who again are a very important voice to have at the table”.
And Cllr Speight added: “I think it’s all very encouraging and a step change from some of the previous planning consultation that we’ve seen.”
“I say again it is vitality important that when there is the opportunity to be a consultee – please do so because this is a document that will determine Thurrock’s future geography.
“Unless we get this right, we’ll see more of what we’ve seen before, the chipping away of various sites. We need to the ones driving the conversation about what Thurrock’s going to be like in 2035, 2050 and 2017 – us and the community together.”
