Further to the Government’s decision to invoke Section 27 of the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 in relation to Erewash Borough Council’s revised Core Strategy, Maggie Throup MP, Member of Parliament for Erewash released the following statement:
“The Core Strategy document forms the essential basis of the Borough Council’s spatial planning framework and is crucial to meeting the long-term needs of local residents and businesses in-terms of new housing, infrastructure and regeneration.
“Although I have made no secret of my long-standing personal commitment to protecting our precious Greenbelt and have consistently called on the Borough Council to instead prioritise the development of available brownfield sites, prior to the local elections the Conservative leadership had developed a professional revised Core Strategy document, which had subsequently been put to the public in the form of two extensive consultations.
“In a cynical act of political showboating, Labour is now proposing to tear up the Core Strategy in its entirety – throwing away years of work and public money in the process, and leaving our community without a plan for the future. All this is being done in secret behind the closed doors of the Town Hall.
“Rather than an affront to democracy as Cllr Dawson would have the public believe, the Section 27 letter that has been issued is a clear demonstration of a democratic check and balance in action.
“The Section 27 letter does not prevent the Council from adapting or amending the Core Strategy within the existing framework, and therefore the Labour group could still choose, for example, to remove the proposed allocation of Greenbelt land in Kirk Hallam and Cotmanhay from the document.
“Crucially, the letter issued to the Borough Council from Minister Rowley makes clear that:
Officials in the department will continue to engage with your officers although I understand that they have been trying to do so, without success, since May 2023.
“By failing to engage with the Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities since they assumed office, the Labour group have engineered a political fight with central government at the expense of us all as Council Taxpayers, who will now inevitably have to foot the bill for an expensive legal battle to resolve their mistakes.”
