National Park consultation on new homes opens

How many new homes a year should be built in the Yorkshire Dales National Park to sustain communities? Your views sought.

Would people like new development to be ‘zero carbon’?  And should planning policies support development that helps Dales farmers to intensify production?  These are the main questions in ‘Consultation No.2 – Exploring our options’, which represents the next step in the process of creating a new Local Plan for the Yorkshire Dales National Park.

The new Local Plan will contain the planning policies that will guide what development can and can’t take place in the National Park from 2023 to 2040.

The closing date for responses to ‘Consultation No.2 – Exploring our options’ is Friday 25^th September 2020.  The first consultation - ‘Consultation No.1 – Setting the agenda’ – closed in February, with 249 people and 26 organisations submitting responses. 

Chairman of the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority, Neil Heseltine, said: “Responses to the first consultation suggested that new housing, lower carbon development and on-farm developments were key areas of interest.   This second consultation gives people an opportunity to comment in detail on these subjects and help shape the planning policies that will be in place for most of this decade and the next.  We are working very closely with the District Councils and County Councils who are responsible for housing and economic development.  Together we commissioned research on demographic changes, housing and socioeconomic trends in the National Park. The evidence in those reports makes for useful reading for anyone interested in the future of the National Park as a place to live and work. 

“Although it’s encouraging that new affordable homes are currently under construction in West Witton in Richmondshire and Long Preston in Craven, getting affordable new homes built is still a big challenge. We would like to know how ambitious people think we need to be on house building to support future community sustainability.  The National Park is a farmed landscape and we don’t want to lose that.  But we know that there are massive challenges facing upland farming, as well as some new opportunities.  Those opportunities will require very different types of development.  So we’d really like to know what people think.”  

Full details of how to respond to the consultation are available here.