Dorset Council’s long-awaited Local Plan – which went out to consultation in 2021 then again in 2025 – is now going to be redrafted, and councillors are being asked to approve spending up to £1m on a new plan at their meeting tonight.
The move is said to be down to changes in how the government expects local authorities to draw up local plans. If the council was to proceed with its original plan the deadline for completion would be this December and that, says the authority, would be too little time – despite the original aim for it to be completed in 2023.
The council did not provide a figure when we asked how much the original plan – which had more than 9,000 responses from the public – cost Dorset taxpayers. It had been expected to be completed and adopted by 2023/2024, however when the Lib Dems won the authority in 2024, that expectation was revised to 2026.
Now, because the new system is intended to enable local plans to be completed in two-and-a-half years, and a four-month ‘scoping’ period will be tacked on too, Dorset will not have a current local plan until 2029 at the earliest.
The spokesman said much of the work already done can be used in the new plan, such as “research, technical studies and feedback from residents” but that 30 months was still “an ambitious timescale, particularly for large and complex areas such as Dorset”.
A local plan is aimed at pinpointing where new homes, jobs and infrastructure should go. It is meant to give councils more influence over development. However, they are only a guide and the government has the power to overturn council decisions as it sees fit.
Cllr Shane Bartlett, cabinet member for planning, says any time and money that has already been wasted is not the council’s fault.
Officers blame a new plan-making system introduced by government and say the government has “doubled Dorset’s housing requirement”, meaning the previous plan does not go far enough in allocating sites for homes.
However it is interesting to note that the council asked to be a pilot for the new plan making framework back in 2022 – this should not have been a surprise.
Many thousands of consultation responses to the old plan came from people who were outraged by sites earmarked for homes in the previous plan. It remains to be seen where a new plan will find room for double that number – around 8,000 homes.
Cllr Bartlett said: “It is a statutory requirement that Dorset Council develops a local plan and takes into account the housing numbers demanded by the Government. These can be challenged provided we can present a strong reasoned argument before the examiner if we feel we cannot meet those housing targets.
“Part of the process is to enable residents to engage with consultations, and we have spent several years preparing Dorset’s Local Plan. However, we now find that the situation has changed through no fault of our own.”
He added: “We are not throwing away years of work, and we are not starting again from scratch.”
Yet another local plan consultation is expected to be launched in April.