Last year changes were made to the Plan which would mean that more waste will be reused, recycled and recovered to reduce the need for landfill. Comments on the revised Plan have been generally supportive.
If the revised draft is approved, there will be a final six week period, from 21 February to 3 April 2012, where local people, representatives of the waste and minerals industry and other interested people can comment on the "soundness" of the document.
In order to be sound, the document must be:
- in line with national policy
- based on accurate information
- the most appropriate solution for the area
- practical
- flexible
- able to be monitored.
After this period, the Plan and any comments received will be sent to the Planning Inspector who will consider all the evidence, including people's comments. If the Inspector decides that the plan is sound it can then be adopted by the authorities.
Over the next four weeks the revised plan (known as the ‘Proposed Submission' Draft Waste and Minerals Plan) will be considered by the three local authorities at the following meetings:
Further information
On 27 October 2011 a draft Waste and Minerals Plan (WMP) was published for a six weeks public consultation period. The revised approach of the draft WMP comprised the following:
- reducing the amount of waste produced
- making provision for increased treatment (e.g. recycling or recovery) of waste including planning for additional capacity for recycling/recovery facilities equivalent to the likely exports of waste for landfill
- identifying an area of focus for later searches for suitable locations for waste treatment facilities
- saving allocations for recycling/recovery facilities until a subsequent Sites document has been adopted
- recognising that the declining amounts of waste still requiring land disposal should utilise existing planning permissions outside the Plan area and therefore the Plan would not include any Areas of Search for landraise or landfill reflecting the County Council's policy steer to "Minimise the amount of the county's waste sent to landfill or landraise"
- safeguarding existing landfill capacity at Pebsham
- resisting the disposal of residual waste from London in the Plan Area
- meeting the apportionment for aggregates advised by Government.
87 responses (containing 170 comments) to the draft WMP were received, which is in marked contrast to the nearly 3,000 comments received to an earlier draft ‘Preferred Strategy' document (most of these were concerned with future land disposal in the Plan Area). The responses generally supported the broad thrust of the approaches set out in the draft WMP, with some people requesting a strengthening of policy protection in certain areas
Reference:
3467
Contact the press team
East Sussex County Council