Skip to content

What is the Greater Exeter Strategic Plan? And how will the new District Council work with it?

  • by JW

Exeter City Council has been producing visions for its future – most of which involves building lots of housing:

Exeter Vision 2020: ‘sustainable development’?

Exeter Vision for 2040

“Garden Communities” for Exeter

 

The bigger picture has to be how much housing we actually need, as looked at recently by the Campaign for the Protection of Rural England:

Devon’s New Housing Need seminar

 

But the even bigger picture is central government determining how much housing should be built in ‘Greater Exeter’:

How much housing and industrial development will happen in East Devon under the Greater Exeter Strategic Plan? >>> We will only know after the upcoming District Council elections in May

 

And the District Council will have to take this bigger plan into account:

A new East Devon local plan will have to implement the strategy set out in the Greater Exeter Strategic Plan by 2023

 

And the Plan is big:

The Greater Exeter Strategic Plan (GESP) is the major strategic blueprint for the area around Exeter. Mid Devon, East Devon, Teignbridge and Exeter City Council will all be working in partnership with Devon County Council, teaming up to create the GESP.

It will only look at where housing developments larger than 500 homes could go, with the aim of building 57,000 new properties cross the four council areas. Across the Greater Exeter Area, 2,661 new homes a year will need to be built, with 885 in East Devon, 777 in Teignbridge, 636 in Exeter and 363 in Mid Devon.

How to sell the Greater Exeter Strategic Plan and its 2,661 new homes a year > offer a 20,000-capacity sports stadium

What’s wrong with the Greater Exeter Strategic Plan > “Huge housing growth does not appear to correlate with very modest job growth.”

 

Now we have had the local elections, the question is how this GESP will be taken forward…

 

The Herald reports on the plans for new ‘Garden Communities’:

Possible locations for new Devon villages set to be released

 

And Devon Live reports on how the new Leader of the District Council sees the GESP:

A draft version of the Greater Exeter Strategic Plan is also expected to be published this summer, and Cllr Ingham said it would be too early to say how East Devon would proceed with the GESP.

He said: “We have to look at the GESP and what the recommendations say, but it is not just us that has had a change of leadership but Teignbridge and Mid Devon as well, so we will also have to see what they have to say and how they want to move forward.

“There are certain things that we directives that we have to operate under and one is on the principle of GESP and whatever we do, the National Planning Policy Framework says we should co-operate. But even if we all disagree, that is still co-operation.

“There are also things and expectations on the NPPF we have to follow, so we have to think long and hard about what commitments we make for our long term strategy. It would be wrong to try and pre-determine and guess what the GESP does come forward with but we will consider it carefully.”

East Devon’s new Independent leader promises the public will be listened to

 

The East Devon Watch blog reports too:

Greater Exeter Strategic Plan: change or no change?

Who represents us for the Greater Exeter Strategic Plan (which sits above Local Plans)?

.