In 2019, CBC declared a Climate Emergency and set out to become a carbon neutral council and borough by 2030. To achieve this, a level of leadership is necessitated from the Council in guiding businesses and communities towards the 2030 target.
Buildings are responsible for almost half of the UK’s carbon emissions and collective action is needed to reduce the negative environmental impacts from building developments. The existing planning regulations are not in parallel with the Council’s ambitions, nor do they provide the much needed hooks for local policy to induce mandatory change.
The development of this SPD will help drive a proactive agenda for sustainable design and construction and help pave the way for future policy changes as our development plans are reviewed.
The SPD cannot introduce new targets that exceed current planning policy, but it can provide practical guidance or direction on how to design and construct new development sustainably and to comply with, or where possible exceed, policy requirements. The SPD will not form part of the development plan but will be an important material consideration in decision-making.
The SPD brings together local, national and international best practice together with case studies that help illustrate practical interventions as part of the development management process and help Cheltenham Borough Council stretch our ambition to drive change.
The SPD incorporates guidance on different aspects of sustainable design and construction, including sections on energy and carbon, climate change adaption, water efficiency, prevention of flooding, pollution, sustainable transport, ecology, biodiversity and achieving net gain, and waste. It also includes a checklist criteria to assist applicants in the process of producing a sustainability statement, to demonstrate how they are responding to climate change and related issues.
The SPD is intentionally ambitious. It goes further than the current adopted policies, but it does so with necessity and purpose. Necessity because we are all in the middle of a climate emergency that needs to be responded to. Purpose because we want to communicate the direction of our future policy, which will be consistent with a zero carbon future, limiting global temperature rises, mitigating the impacts of climate change and limiting biodiversity loss.
The procedure for preparing SPDs is set out in the Town and Country Planning (Local Planning) (England) Regulations 2012. Regulation 12 requires that before a local planning authority can adopt an SPD it has to prepare a statement setting out the persons it consulted when preparing the guidance, a summary of the main issues raised and how those issues have been dealt with in the SPD. There must then be a period of consultation (of not less than four weeks) on the draft SPD and the statement about its preparation.
The current consultation will run for just over 4 weeks between 7 March 2022 and 4 April 2022. Comments received will be considered and inform revisions to the SPD. The final draft will then be presented to Council for formal adoption.
Hard copies of the document are available on request and will be available to view in local libraries.
*For details of how your information will be used please see Cheltenham Borough Council's privacy policy *
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