How we plan to do the Parish plan
Parish Planning
Why we need to look at a Parish Plan?
What Parish Plans can achieve;
- enable communities to engage meaningfully with the local planning process
- make known those issues that affect your community
- identify and prioritise Key Issues with your community
- produce an Action Plan to promote the changes that communities want to see at local, district and county levels
- are useful in influencing the maintenance and creation of community services and facilities such as;
- identifying new uses for the Village Hall or other community buildings
- encouraging the setting up of a parent and baby clinic
- providing after school child care and a holiday club for school children
- improving liaison with the police and establishing a neighborhood watch scheme
- feeding into district and county strategies, through Local Strategic Partnerships
- are useful in Influencing the planning system by;
- identifying local needs for affordable housing or community facilities
- producing a design statement for new development
- identifying which open spaces are needed and valued for community use
- giving a local dimension to broader planning policies
- working with the planning process to deliver sustainable development
- are useful in identifying and planning action that the local community can undertake itself, such as;
- re-opening a closed village shop
- producing a community newsletter
- providing a community transport scheme
- carrying out environmental improvements
- creating a new play area and place for young people to meet
How would we possible do a parish plan.
Creating a parish plan.
It can be divided in 3 parts.
1. Identifying the questions and forming the objectives.
2. Publishing and distributing the Parish Plan.
3. Analysing the parish plan, publishing the information.
Part 1. Identifying the questions.
The thing with the parish plan is that we need to know what to ask and what we want to achieve with it.
A very interesting suggestion was to ask people to post questions under different topic headings. These would need to be discussed, but an examples would be, traffic, youth, services, housing, facilities, environment, fears and hopes.
Before the questions can created we need to know what the parishioners are thinking.
A suggestions on how this can be accomplished would be first to use graffiti sheets. This is like a form of brain storming, where people can post questions under specific topics, and see what other people have posted as questions. It would be done over a 4 week period.
Use of the parish magazine, but have recently found this does not go to all houses and is charged for. Can we as a parish council sponsor a magazine to get it to every house.
By passing smaller A4 sheets to the local Community groups,
· Village Hall
· WI
· Cornwood Show Meeting.
· Housing Group
Via Website, allowing people to log on and post the comments and see the comments posted already.
Finally, by distributing the A4 sheets to the houses if we felt this was not enough.
To assist in distribution or collection, I have approached the Watermark Centre for possible free Cinema tickets and transport for the youths in the village willing to assist in the footwork.
The Committee
The next step would be to form a steering group. This is not the Parish Council, but a group formed from representatives from local groups and parishioners. Ideally we would be looking for 8 people. The role of these people is to look at the responses back, and to determine what the questions should be, and how we wish to take this forward.
Once we have the questions then the questionnaire can be produced and passed to South Hams parish planning dept for their comments and suggestions.
2. Production and Distribution.
Once the questions and topic areas have been established, we need to get the actual questionnaire produced. There are a lot of examples available and the steering group can look at these to assist in the phrasing of the questions.
We then need to distribute copies to every household in the parish. Allowing 2 weeks for completion then they can be collected.
Distribution can take a number of forms. Again calling on the Youths for distribution with in the villages may be a necessity, with other support to deliver outside the village. We would then collect the questionnaires back.
3. Analysing the information.
Support is available for this from a number of individuals and sources, the results can then be published through the magazine and the village website.
Duration
This process could take as long as 6 months to accomplish and would require a great deal of support.
