Northamptonshire Expansion - 2010 Diary

16 Jul 2010  -  WNJPU publishes WNJS Planning Committee Agenda for 26th July 2010 meeting

1.  Detailed Numeric Review of the above Agenda

As stated in the initial review ( see Diary entry dated 16 July 2010 ) the published Agenda is a 331 page document.

There is only one issue on the Agenda, requiring that the Committee 'Receive and Note' the responses from the Emergent Joint Core Strategy Consultation held in the summer of last year.  Supporting details are provided in Appendix 1, which comprises 321 pages of the agenda.  The WNJPU have extracted 'Key Points' from the responses and these are individually itemised against each of the questions in the 303 pages of the appendix.  Therefore, this appendix does not list all of the responses, only those points that that the JPU consider to be key to progressing the Joint Core Strategy.

2.  Comparison of Response and Representation Volumes

• The general four page introduction in the Agenda, prior to the Appendix, states that:

                                        4,781    individuals and organisations,

                    submitted      6,355    responses,

           which contained   120,668    individual comments (representations)

• In contrast, the initial publication of all responses by the WNJPU on 5 June 2010 (see this Expansion Diary entry dated 5th June 2010) highlighted that there were:

                                        6,390     responses

                 containing      119,682    representations

Therefore, over the six week period between the original publication of all responses and the current extraction, the number of responses have reduced, but the representations have increased. 

3.  Agenda Appendix 1:  Summaries of the Responses by Consultation Question

Appendix 1  comprises

• An overall introduction to the analysis (1 page)
• A description of each of the 56 questions (5 pages)
• A Glossary of Terms (10 pages)
• The itemised Key Points / representations (303 pages)

It would be difficult to check the majority of the information provided in this document without repeating the work that the WNJPU has undertaken.  However, a series of numeric extracts may illustrate aspects of specific interest. 

The overall introduction in the appendix states that the Key Points have been listed for each question in three groups.

• Support For
• Object To
• General Comments

This is true for 55 of the 56 questions, but question 52, asking for 'Other Comments', is not sub-divided in this way.

In the following table, the Key Points for each question are totalled by these groups, and then totalled for each question. The key points for Question 52 are grouped in nine different sub-catagories, as illustrated in the second table.

The full descriptions for the 56 questions are generally quite lengthy, and are summarised here simply for illustration. Please see section 2 of the Appendix to view the actual wording of the questions.

Note:  The colour coding added to selected questions and totals is simply used to highlight those items that may be of special interest, or where the number of key points are high or low, individually or in comparison.   

A number of question totals are highlighted simply because they are highly supported or objected to, or the number in a cell is significantly higher than the count in other cells.  Questions 27 to 31 ( and particularly Question 28 ) are highlighted since they are closely associated with the area close to our village.  These selections may not be significant to the importance of the issues and each area may need to be viewed in greater detail.  There is no guidance provided.

It is interesting to note that the numbers of key points extracted for each question is fairly even, almost as if some balancing has been undertaken. This cannot be easily checked.

4.  Total Number of Representations by Question

Prior to looking at the key points for each question, first consider the overall volumes of representations quoted over the past few weeks.

In the inital review of this Agenda ( see Diary entry dated 16 July 2010, or link here ) it was noted that the overall 119,682 representations had been reduced to around 20,000 in the search list of representations by question. Presumably this was mainly due to duplication of entries by different people.

Refering to the main table above, the total of  Key Points for all questions is  3,799.  Therefore, the remaining 80% of the points ( representations ) were not considered to be significant enough for reporting to the planning committee, or similar comments have been combined.

In both cases no real clarification is provided.  

The following table summarises representation totals leading up to the publication of the Key Points in  Appendix 1.

More information to follow . . .  Please link here.

Date last updated:  28 Jul 2010                                                                                         Valid until:  31 Dec 2010