The Battle for Legal Aid

As the battle to secure access to justice for all continues in the Lords, Willy has written an online article which you can access here.

January Branch meeting

At our January meeting, we again discussed the Boundary Commision decision. It looks like we will be joining with Daventry, so we will need to get to know our prospective new comrades.

Other news - the GC held an excellent meeting on education last month with a well-informed speaker from London; the meeting in February will be on funding of voluntary legal advice, which is facing cuts, just when people most need it.

We discussed the 2 new housing developments proposed for Lutterworth.

At our fund-raising Gala dinner, over 50 people attended, and over £500 was raised.

HDC Core Strategy



Last November Harborough District Council adopted its Core Strategy for planning.  This supercedes some, but not all, of the hard-fought-for policies in the Local Plan.  Essentially, it accords with the Coalition's 'light-touch' for development control which in turn basically means no meaningful control whatsoever. 

The all-embracing get-out clause in terms of planning gain (the only way communities have achieved anything out of the tsunami of development since the 1980s) is, to my mind, policy CS12(d) of the core strategy - planning gain will not be allowed to affect the financial viability of the scheme.  How incompetent would an accountant need to be to fail to get under that hurdle?

Most of the key documents are easily accessed via the link in the blog post above, but I also recommend to members' attention the Strategic Land Availability Assessment documents which are available here, and which are still open to representations until January 20 2012.