Planning for your Future through the Local Plan?
27th February 2025
As part of our Collaboration Hub and Community Voice work with the Lake District National Park Partnership we are offering to support communities to engage fully with the revision of the Local Plan. This plan will set out to a large extent what will be built and where in the National Park for the next two decades, so it's worth getting involved. Get in touch if you're interested.
To help parishes, communities, residents and workers get what they need from the new Local Plan, we’re trying something new. With full support from the Lake District National Park Planning team, ACT is offering eight Lake District communities a chance to feed in to Local Plan development, before it reaches statutory consultation. The timetable for Local Plan revision is still being finalised. It is likely that statutory consultation will begin in the Autumn next year (2026).
If you would like to be one of these communities please let us know. We are focusing on settlements – communities of place, villages or parishes. It does not matter how much you know about the current Local Plan. We want to get to know your place and use your experience and ambition for your place as foundations for the new Plan.
ACT will work with three different groups in your community; perhaps a mother and toddler group, a lunch club, sports club, school group or parish council. One structured conversation with each group will help us catch what’s working and what needs to change in your place. ACT will turn these conversations into a brief Community Statement, which could form the basis of a Community Plan.
Alongside the production of a Community Statement, an artist will be commissioned to turn your words into a poster illustrating the hopes and challenges of your place. So at the end of our work there will be a series of professional artworks to help us have wider conversations about the things we need to protect and our hopes for the future of the Lake District.
Each of the communities we work with will get bespoke feedback from the Planning team, explaining what is within the remit of the Local Plan and how to have effective conversations about this as the statutory consultation progresses. This is a great offer. We are very grateful for the commitment of the Planning team to give us this opportunity.
Over the next 18 months we are also organising four or five public seminars about what the Local Plan is and what it means for our communities and places. These will be hosted by ACT but will include staff from the Lake District National Park so we have Planning expertise in the room.
Do you want to volunteer your place to take part in these supported conversations about the new Local Plan? Unusually, ACT will do a lot of the work for you - so that it's easier for you to get involved and so that we can gather ideas and information from you quickly and feed it in to the Plan consultation process. If this sounds interesting to you, please get in touch with Fran on franrichardson@cumbriaaction.org.uk