Your district, your future

Core Strategy public consultation, Spring 2009.

Stroud District Council is in the early stages of drafting an important new planning framework for the District. At the centre of this will be the Core Strategy: a broad brush policy document, which will provide an overview of the District and how it will evolve up to 2026. The Core Strategy will form the basis of planning policy decisions for the District, and it will set the context for other more detailed planning policy documents in the future.

We are asking for your help in identifying the major issues that are facing the District, and what our options might be for tackling them. We already have some ideas, but are we heading in the right direction? We want your views as residents, employers, landowners and investors in this district.

 

 

 

 

 

20 questions that will help to shape the future of Stroud District

We've published a questionnaire about some of the key issues facing the district, together with some suggested options for addressing them. Its a simple tick-box survey: all you have to do is rate the various options and tell us which of the issues you think are most or least important. There's also space for you to tell us if you think we've missed something.

These 20 questions will help the Council decide what the Core Strategy will say about:

• What gets built (and what is unlikely to get built)
• Where things should be built and how land should be used
• How new development should look and how it should function

Most of the questions will ask you to score the desirability and importance of each option, from 1 to 5. You can give the same score to several options in each question if you wish - you don't have to put them in order of preference. Please try to complete every question if you can, so that we can build up a meaningful picture of what people really think.

Please note: your responses to the questionnaire will be displayed on this consultation portal once we have been able to process them - but none of your personal details will appear, apart from your name and a consultee identification number.

The closing date for responses is Friday 1st May.

You don't have to trawl through masses of information in order to fill in this questionnaire. If you just want to give us your gut feelings, that's fine. But there is plenty available if you want to dig a bit deeper:

 

Key Issues discussion paper

We have published a discussion paper, which looks at each of the 19 issues covered by the questionnaire in a bit more detail. The Core Strategy Key Issues discussion paper paints a picture of the district today and puts forward a selection of the issues that we think will be at the forefront of making it a thriving, sustainable and attractive place in the future. You can read it here, or download it from our main website (www.stroud.gov.uk/core), where there is also lots of information about the Local Development Framework and our Core Strategy evidence base.

Evidence base

We have been collecting facts and figures and gathering opinions over a long period of time, and we will continue to do so over the next year or so. This is what is known as the "evidence base": its what helps us to identify the district's current and future needs, as well as obligations (like having to provide a certain number of new homes over a particular period). We've put a lot of this on our website, and we'll add more as this process goes on (www.stroud.gov.uk/core).