Guernsey Press

Failing or not, don’t expect to tear up the IDP

TODAY the States is due to debate the Development & Planning Authority’s 2020 Annual Monitoring Report, which is expected to turn into a substantial ‘bashing’ of the Island Development Plan and its many perceived failings.

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States members agreed last month to consider the report, and it is expected that many will do so because they want to complain about how the IDP, the document which contains the factors and policies to be taken into account by the DPA when making decisions on applications for planning permission, is failing Guernsey.

Housing will almost certainly become the focus of the debate, whether that be lack of progress, changes required to the island’s number targets, or the zoning of land.

Members of the Development & Planning Authority will face this down, or take it on board, little more than 24 hours after facing the Scrutiny Management Committee along what might well prove to be very similar lines.

Is the IDP flawed? We’ll hear the perspective of deputies, but we also know that we’ll be stuck with the current IDP for a while yet.

Yesterday the DPA told Scrutiny that the key elements of the plan, which was approved in 2016 for a 10-year period and was due to have a comprehensive five-year review, which was pulled in favour of a Covid recovery strategy, are now being reviewed individually.

This, the authority said, was actually easier for the public to understand and its president Deputy Victoria Oliver said the ability to pick out the policies the authority thought were appropriate to target – including considering the threshold for the development framework process and the debate over building on green or brownfield sites – was a more realistic one.

‘We will do it in easy steps rather than one big parcel, it’s the one big parcel that makes it a lot more difficult to properly understand, if you do it individually it will be easier,’ said Deputy Oliver.

The process for changing the plan, or individual elements of it, remains a time-consuming one.

So deputies can say what they wish this week, but we shouldn’t be expecting any significant changes from the plan any time soon.