Tendring District Council consulted the public, the development industry, community representatives and any other interested parties to get their views on how the district should grow between now and 2026.

This is the first stage of community engagement on the Council's Local Development Framework - Core Strategy. This consultation exercise ran until Friday 1st May 2009. The Core Strategy will be the most important planning document we produce because it will set out the overall vision for future change in the district, explain (in broad terms) where the growth in new jobs and housing will go and will contain policies that the Council will use to assess planning applications.

At this point in time, we haven't made any decisions on what the Core Strategy should contain because we first wanted to gauge the views of the people and other organisations, including you! We have produced a ' discussion document' which contains questions on a variety of different subjects along with a few suggestions as to how we could deal with growth in the district. Issues raised in this document and your comments will form an important part of the 'evidence' that will influence the key decisions the Council will need to make when we produce our 'preferred options' Core Strategy document for consultation later in the year.

Here are four options documents for how new growth in jobs and housing could be distributed throughout the district. To engage with members of the public, we held a series of exhibitions throughout the district where officers were available to discuss any issues and answer any questions.

Call for Sites

Alongside the consultation exercise to look at issues and possible options, we also undertook a 'call for sites' asking for any sites within the district that you wanted to promote for future development, in order that we could consider their merits.

Seeking the views of Businesses

We also consulted the business world on what we should be doing, through our planning policies, to support local businesses and secure inward investment.

Supplementary Questions for local Councillors and Town and Parish Councils

For information, we have also sent the following questions to Tendring District Councillors and Town and Parish Councils to provide any comments about planning issues within the communities they represent.

Sustainability Appraisal Scoping Report

A key piece of evidence that will inform any decisions the Council makes will be the 'Sustainability Appraisal', a legal requirement of the planning system. This scoping report is designed to identify all the factors we will need to take into account when the Council assesses different policies and proposals.

Sustainability Appraisal Scoping Report

The deadline for responses to any of these documents was 4.00pm on Friday 1st May 2009. Any comments that were received after this date were not considered.

The above links will open adobe acrobat pdf documents and you will need the free adobe acrobat reader software to open them.