The Neighbourhood Plan Specialists
Updating a Neighbourhood Plan
Paragraph 14 of the NPPF enables the five year land supply requirement to be reduced to three in areas which have an up to date neighbourhood plan in place (less than two years old), and which contain policies and allocations to meet the identified housing requirement. Parishes in this position effectively remove the presumption in favour of sustainable development within their parish as long as three years of land supply can be demonstrated.
Communities with made neighbourhood plans can review or ‘modify’ their plans at any time, although it is not compulsory to do so. Made neighbourhood plans are monitored annually through the Authority Monitoring Report and this can be used as a tool to consider the suitability of proceeding with an update. The nature of any proposed changes or modifications will affect the process that the neighbourhood plan will need to go through when being reviewed. National guidance sets out three types of update or modification which can be made:
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Minor (non-material) modifications to a neighbourhood plan are those which would not materially affect the policies in the plan. These may include correcting errors, such as a reference to a supporting document, and would not require examination or a referendum.
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Material modifications which do not change the nature of the plan would require examination but not a referendum.
This might, for example, entail the addition of a design code that builds on a pre-existing design policy, or the addition of a site or sites which, subject to the decision of the independent examiner, are not so significant or substantial as to change the nature of the plan.
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Material modifications which do change the nature of the plan or order would require examination and a referendum. This might, for example, involve allocating significant new sites for development. It should be noted that a material modification would require the qualifying body (the town or parish council) to re-run the pre-submission consultation. The qualifying body would also need to state (at the pre-submission and submission stage) whether they believe the modifications are so significant or substantial as to change the nature of the plan and provide the reasons why.
Whilst a qualifying body can update its plan at any time to include new housing site allocations, there are a number of risks associated with this.
In order to allocate new land, most of the statutory neighbourhood planning process needs to be rerun. This includes significant areas of work including undertaking site assessment work, completing two stages of consultation (pre-submission and submission), undertaking an examination with an independent examiner and potentially completing a Strategic Environmental Assessment. The level of work required will depend, to a large degree on the amount of work undertaken previously, and also the scale of the allocations involved. The decision on the need for a referendum will ultimately fall to the neighbourhood plan examiner but will be required where the plan is considered to constitute a material modification which is deemed to be significant or substantial enough to change the nature of the plan.
Luckily Locality understand this and have made all the grant full amounts available to any council who makes the decision to update their Neighbourhood Plan.
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