Transcript

Good afternoon, welcome to the June meeting of the South Caesarea District Council cabinet. I'm Councillor Ashley Baxter, I chair this committee. To my right is Chief Executive Karen Bradford and to her right is our Monitoring Officer Graham Watts. Please ensure your mobile phones are set to stun. Please be aware that there is no fire alarm planned for this afternoon, if there is a fire alarm or a fire, please leave by the fire exit at the back of the room. If you wish to raise a question or make a comment, can I please ask you to indicate by raising your hand. This meeting is being broadcast via the SKDC public eye website and can be watched later as a live stream. Please note that there will be an opportunity for those visiting members, non-cabinet members who are in the chamber to ask questions of cabinet members at item 7 on this agenda. I want to say thank you for all those people who have been involved during the week in two sets of events. First of all, all the events around D-Day, the 80th anniversary of D-Day, especially those who have been putting things on. I know that Councillor Dilks has been working hard as the chair of the Born and Deepings British Legion with these events and I know people across the district have been participating and remembering the sacrifices that were made by people who took part in that historic event. Secondly, I'd like to say thank you to Inspire Plus who invited myself and the Chief Executive and some other members to the Mini Olympics this morning which was a fantastic event. Over 700 children, young children, taking part in a truly inspirational event at the Meares Stadium with flags of different countries, a really good celebration of youth. So having said that, we will now begin to make our way through the agenda for today, beginning with apologies for absence. Thank you, leader. We've had apologies from the Deputy Leader, Councillor Paul Stokes, for today. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you. May I also take this opportunity to welcome Councillor Virginia Moran to her first cabinet meeting. Please behave yourself. And that goes for everybody. Everybody, including you. Stay on the script. Minutes of the previous meetings. You'll notice that we've got the minutes of the November meeting. These are here for a clerical reason. They have been slightly amended since the first time that we approved them. Does anybody have any comments on the content of the minutes of November? If not, would anyone like to propose that they are accepted? Thank you, Councillor Baker and Councillor Cleaver. All those in favour of accepting those minutes? All those against? All those abstentions? We have one abstention. Thank you. Those are passed. We now go to the minutes of the last cabinet meeting, which was in May, the 14th of May. Does anybody have any comments on the content? If not, would anyone like to propose that they're accepted as a record? Councillor Rayside, Councillor Knowles this time. Thank you. All those in favour of accepting these minutes? All those against? Any abstentions? We have one abstention. Thank you. Those are approved. Moving on to disclosures of interest. Does anybody have any interest in this meeting? We have no declarations of interest in this meeting. The Chief Executive is kicking me under the table. Moving on to item four on the agenda, which would be the new build housing scheme for 21 units at Larch Close. In consultation with all the relevant parties, I have decided to defer this item to a future meeting of cabinet in order to allow officers to review the value for money assessment for the proposed development and to ensure the proposed development meets for latest social housing needs. It is important that we ensure a scheme of this scale and cost provides value for money to the HRA, the housing revenue account, and also that the scheme provides the offer that those in housing need actually require. I understand that Councillor Moran wants to add a comment. Or maybe not. No? Okay. So having deferred this item, we are able to move on to item five, the local development scheme 2024 to 2027. May I invite Councillor Dilks, the cabinet member for planning to introduce this item. Thank you. Thank you, leader. Following the adoption of the current South Kestevan local plan in January 2020, as you will know, the council embarked on a local plan review to address South Kestevan's need and sustainability guide development up to the year 2041. In line with the local development scheme, the regulation 18 draft local plan was published for an eight week consultation in February this year. And we encouraged members, residents, landowners and other stakeholders to respond. I'm delighted to say that the consultation attracted a positive response rate with over 1,500 responses received by the closing date, including responses we asked for from the public and stakeholders. To ensure that each comment is now carefully considered, the schemes timetable has been revised to allow the council to properly process these representations and comments and then incorporate any prudent changes into the pre-submission local plan as a consequence. The council is required to keep the local development scheme up to date to reflect any changes in the timetable for the new local plan. As such, the council has reviewed the scheme to ensure that the new timetable for plan is both realistic and achievable. Whilst there are some risks associated with the delay, the council considers them to be minor as we do have an up to date local plan and can demonstrate a five year housing land supply. The revised scheme in the appendix indicates that the next regulatory public consultation stage, which is pre-submission of our plan, will be in the coming winter, 24/25, with submission to the Secretary of State by 30 June 2025. This will ensure that the local plan is considered under the existing legal framework and was always the plan that we had. I would invite cabinet to endorse the revised local development scheme and agree to it being published on the council's website. Once published, the council will then notify the Secretary of State, whoever he or she might be, through the planning inspectorate. All district councillors, town and parish councillors, will also be notified. May I seek your approval, members of the cabinet, with one correction on page 7 of the appendix, or page 39 if you've got the full papers, and there is a literal that has crept in, consultation on the draft local plan on table 2 on page 39 should read that it was completed on the 25th of April 2024, not 25. Apologies for that. Thank you, Chairman. Thank you, Councillor Dilks. Do we have any comment or feedback? Councillor Cleaver? Thank you. I note the comments made about neighbourhood planning in this document. May I reiterate once again the need for local town and parish councils to be made aware of the importance of making sure their neighbourhood plans are in sync with the revisions to our SKDC local plan. Thank you. Would you like to respond to that, Councillor Dilks? I'd like to welcome the comment, thank you. Do we have any other comments about the planning process? I would say thank you to the 1500 people who participated in the consultation and also the people who signed petitions on any particular site. Can I just confirm, Councillor Dilks, that the petitions that we've received about particular sites will be gathered and appreciated as part of the review and analysis process? Absolutely, that is the point of the process that we are carefully going through now. We didn't want to just sort of not take notice of those 1500, that's the whole reason we've asked for people's opinions. They are now being carefully processed by the planning team and in the autumn we will come up with a new document that will show all of those comments and any prudent and necessary changes to the original draft plan. With that, if I have no more comments, can I ask for someone to propose? Thank you, I've got a proposal and a secondary in Councillors Dilks and Knowles. All those in favour? All those against? I think that's unanimous. Any abstentions? No. So that's approved. So thank you Cabinet for doing that. The next item on the agenda is items for information, for which I have three. Firstly, I'm pleased to say that tomorrow the Council will release a, I don't know if we'd call it a promotional video, but a video of Grantham is Open for Business, which has been produced, especially at this time that the marketplace is undergoing refurbishment. We plan as part of our general activities to promote Grantham Town Centre to release this video tomorrow to encourage people to come and to know that the businesses in the town centre are accessible certainly to pedestrians and we want those businesses to succeed. My second issue is Mallard Pass Solar Farm, which is not a decision for this Council to make, but is I know very interesting to some members of the Council. The decision was deferred from the original date and should have been expected mid-June instead. Because of some national issue, let's call it a general election, that announcement is not going to take place before the 4th of July and we will need to appoint a new Secretary of State before we can have a Secretary of State's decision on that particular issue. Who knows, we might have the same Secretary of State, but whoever takes the post of Secretary of State will make a decision on that after the 4th of July and that's the reason that that particular issue is delayed. Mr Chairman, actually I don't think the Secretary of State is standing in elections, so it will be a new one. Thank you. Let's hope they don't get moved to the House of Lords and continue as Secretary of State. There's always a way, but it's not for this meeting to speculate on the outcome of the election or the appointment of the Secretary of State, sadly. So the third thing is about the date of the next Cabinet. I'll pass you to the Chief Executive to make a comment about the timing of the Cabinet meeting. Thank you, Leader. So the timing of the next Cabinet meeting, of course, is the 9th of July, so therefore the meeting will be called and reports will be available then in the Purda period. So just looking at the agenda, which is the next item on your agenda today, there will be a number of those reports will be therefore to follow. We'll call the meeting as appropriately, but the reports will be to follow to ensure that as we're in a Purda period, that none of those could be significantly used to influence anything of the election. So just to make you aware. Thank you for that clarification. So we look forward to that meeting and in anticipation of that, I invite you to look at item 6 on the agenda, which is the Cabinet forward plan. As ever, this is a live document that could change at any moment, but we present it to Cabinet so that we are aware of what's coming forward. Do we have any questions or comments about the forward plan? We have one from Mr Wellborn. Just very quickly to say that I think I've republished the forward plan a couple of times since this has gone out. So there's a couple of reports on there that I've either moved, I'll probably refer all members to the current plan online and also large close will now obviously have to slot into the 9th of July meeting as well. Thank you, leader. Thank you for that. Any other thoughts or comments in anticipation of next month's meeting? No. Well, I believe that is just for noting. So we've nothing to vote on there, which brings us to the last item on the agenda, which is members open questions. We have one member in the chamber. Councillor Harrison, thank you for coming. Do you have any questions? You have no questions. So we're fine for another month. It's worth repeating that questions are welcome to Cabinet members at any time in virtually any form format. But in order to we've had a struggle in full Council meetings over many years of getting to the point of members open questions in the full Council meeting. So this is an additional opportunity for members of any political background to come along and ask questions in a public forum. So without any of those, that brings us to the end of the meeting, which is quite short. I think it's a record for this administration to be closing the meeting before 20 past two. So thank you for coming, and I look forward to seeing you on the 9th of July.