The Statement of Community Involvement (SCI) sets out the council's approach to community engagement in:
It sets out who may be involved, by what method and at what point in the process of document production or in the determination of planning applications. The aim of the SCI is to increase public involvement in the planning processes and give more certainty to those people wanting to get involved in the planning process.
The Statement of Community Involvement which has recently been updated to reflect government guidance, can be downloaded at the bottom of this page. Please note that the spatial strategy referred to as the Greater Manchester Spatial Strategy (GMSF) on page 36 of the document is now known as Places for Everyone.
Under the current government regulations (Regulation 10A of the Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012 (as amended)), the council must review its SCI at least once every five years, starting from its adoption date, to ensure that it is kept up to date, and to ensure effective community involvement at all stages of the planning process.
In this context “review” is to consider whether a document needs to be updated, rather than the process of updating the document itself.
There have been a number of changes since the SCI was adopted in 2010 including:
On the basis of these changes the conclusion of the review process found that the SCI should be updated.
A copy of the full review of the SCI can be downloaded below.
Although the review has found the SCI to be in need of being updated it is not considered to be creating any significant issues in its current form. The council are currently focusing all of its resources on progressing the Places for Everyone joint Development Plan Document. This is now reaching an advanced stage with the submission of the plan to the Secretary of State for independent examination taking place at the end of June 2021.
We think that in terms of the SCI, that the applicability of the proposed approach to different stages of the plan-making and planning application processes remains appropriate and comprehensible at the current time. We are also concerned that if we updated the SCI now it would only cause confusion as to how it relates to where we are in the existing Places for Everyone process.
It has therefore been agreed that the process of updating the SCI should not commence until the Places for Everyone has progressed further. A timetable for this shall be included within a future version of the council’s local development scheme.
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This page was last updated on 21 October 2022