In January 2003 Wealden District Council published the Wealden Local Plan Review First Deposit Draft and asked for your views on the draft proposals and policies. Some 6500 representations were submitted in response to the first draft Plan and these have all been carefully considered by the Council to see where changes should be made to the Plan. All the changes made in response to your comments have now been incorporated into a revised version of the Plan which has also been published for public comment.

All the changes made in response to your comments have now been incorporated into a revised version of the Plan which has also been published for public comment. The Revised Draft Plan can be viewed here.

This database has been produced in order to provide you with a tool to search through the summaries of representations submitted in response to the publication of the First Deposit Draft. It also enables you to view the officers’ comments which were considered by the Wealden Local Plan Review Special Review Committee (WLPRSR Committee) and the WLPRSR Committee’s subsequent recommendations.

In the “officer comments” field in the database you will see expressions used such as “not accepted“ or “partly accepted“. These expressions may appear somewhat harsh but are there to advise the Committee members whether the officers believe the specific change sought should be made to the First Deposit Draft. In many cases, the Council actually has sympathy with the views expressed even where it states “not accepted”, but considers that there is no planning justification to amend the text of the Plan.

Furthermore, in many instances the “officer comments” field in the database does not include any specific comments but refers to a “main report”. In such circumstances in order to view the officer comments you should click on the associated button which provides a link to the reports which were considered by the Wealden Local Plan Review Special Review Committee. As the Review Committee met on seven separate occasions, to considered the representations submitted to the Plan, you will need to refer to the field on the database which contains the date your representation was considered by the Committee.

Please note that representations seeking amendments to development boundaries have been considered by the Review Committee under the relevant site specific chapter.  For example, representations seeking amendments to the development boundary for Hailsham, have been considered under Chapter 15.