Fordingbridge and the New Forest Local Plan: A Community’s Ongoing Case for Better Planning

Preface: What Fordingbridge Has Already Said

This response, and the neighbourhood planning case that follows it, do not emerge from a standing start. Fordingbridge Town Council has already engaged seriously and substantively with the NFDC Local Plan process. In response to the earlier Issues and Scope Consultation (the first stage of the current Local Plan review) the Town Council submitted detailed representations that explain why the scale of growth now proposed in the Regulation 18 Spatial Options document raises such significant concerns.

Those earlier representations were measured and constructive, but they were also frank about the track record of planning in Fordingbridge and about the conditions that would need to be met before further large-scale growth could be considered credible. Several themes from that response are directly relevant to what the Local Plan is now proposing, and they are worth summarising here.

Growth had already outpaced infrastructure

The Town Council was clear that the current NFDC Local Plan had allocated a disproportionate level of strategic development to Fordingbridge relative to its size, character and existing facilities, and that the infrastructure and services often used to justify such growth had simply not materialised. Public transport remained limited, car dependency was unaddressed, employment provision had not grown, outward commuting remained high, town centre investment had not followed, and health services had not kept pace. The Town Council argued that Fordingbridge’s status as a sustainable settlement, at the top of the District’s settlement hierarchy, needed to be honestly interrogated rather than assumed.

The place-making role of planning had been neglected

The Town Council observed that previous plan-making had focused so heavily on housing numbers that it had failed to articulate any meaningful vision for Fordingbridge’s future: what kind of place it should become, how its character should be shaped, how its existing community should be served. It called for the new NFDC Local Plan to correct this by putting place-making at its centre.

Affordable housing delivery had failed in practice

Despite viability testing at plan-making stage, subsequent planning applications on allocated sites had consistently failed to deliver policy-compliant levels of affordable housing. The Town Council called for site-specific viability testing on all future strategic allocations, a recommendation that would apply with particular force to growth options of the scale now being proposed.

Infrastructure must be planned and delivered, not listed and hoped for

The Town Council identified a persistent gap between infrastructure being identified on paper and actually being delivered. It pointed specifically to Hampshire County Council’s Access Strategy for Fordingbridge and the draft Local Cycling and Walking Infrastructure Plan (LCWIP), both documents full of improvement ideas but with no funding attached, as examples of a wider pattern in which communities bear the burden of growth without receiving the investment that is supposed to accompany it.

The Neighbourhood Plan needed to be treated as a genuine partner

The Town Council noted that Fordingbridge was in the process of preparing a Neighbourhood Plan and asked, presciently, as it turns out, for early and meaningful discussion about how the Local Plan would treat Neighbourhood Plan areas, both in terms of site allocations and in terms of the relationship between strategic and local policies. It called for the two processes to run in genuine dialogue, not in parallel isolation.

From Issues and Scope to Spatial Options: The Importance Has Now Increased

Those representations were submitted roughly a year ago. Since then, the Local Plan process has moved forward to the Regulation 18 Spatial Options and Policy Direction stage, and what has emerged for Fordingbridge is a growth proposal of a scale that makes the Town Council’s earlier concerns not merely relevant but urgent.

The three Strategic Development Growth Options now identified around Fordingbridge:

  • SDGO M to the south east
  • SDGO N to the east
  • SDGO O to the north and north west

Together propose up to approximately 2,850 homes, with around 1,800 considered deliverable within the Plan period to 2043. For a market town of around 6,000 residents, this represents a potential increase in housing stock of somewhere between 30 and 40 percent. It is, by any assessment, a transformational scale of change.

What is striking, and troubling, is that the policy document setting out these options does not reflect the seriousness of the concerns raised just a year earlier. The issues that the Town Council flagged with care and precision in its Issues and Scope response e.g. infrastructure deficits, the absence of a place vision, the A338 severance problem, the fragility of affordable housing delivery, and the need for a genuine Neighbourhood Plan partnership, reappear in the Spatial Options document as brief bullet points, unresolved and largely unaddressed. The evidence base that the Town Council rightly called for has not been assembled. An honest interrogation of Fordingbridge’s sustainability credentials has not taken place. The infrastructure delivery planning has not been done.

The critique that follows sets out, in detail, why the supporting text in the Spatial Options document is inadequate to explain how growth of this scale will be successfully delivered, and why it would be inadequate even if the ambition to grow Fordingbridge were accepted in principle. It then sets out how a professionally supported, community-led neighbourhood plan can become the most effective tool available to Fordingbridge to ensure that if growth does come, it comes on terms that are transparent, well-designed, properly resourced and genuinely shaped by the people who know and love this town.

The Town Council has already demonstrated that it is capable of serious, evidence-based engagement with the planning system. What the NFDC Local Plan must now demonstrate is that it is capable of taking that engagement seriously in return.

Critique: Fordingbridge Strategic Development Growth Options M, N and O

Scale of Growth and the Limits of the Evidence Base

The three Strategic Development Growth Options around Fordingbridge collectively propose up to approximately 2,850 homes in total, with around 1,800 realistically deliverable within the Plan period to 2043. For context, Fordingbridge is a small market town of roughly 6,000 residents. This represents a potential increase in the town’s housing stock of somewhere in the region of 30 to 40% which is a transformational level of change by any measure.

Yet the supporting text across all three SDGOs is strikingly thin. It amounts to a list of issues and financial contribution categories that are broadly identical across all three options, with little differentiation, no quantified assessment of cumulative impact, and no indication of how or whether these constraints can actually be resolved. For a plan that aspires to sustainable development, this is a significant shortcoming.

The Cumulative Impact Problem

The most glaring omission is any treatment of the three SDGOs as a combined growth strategy. Each is presented in isolation, with its own list of considerations, yet all three share the same River Avon designated site concerns, the same bat survey recommendations and the same infrastructure contribution headings. There is no cumulative transport assessment, no combined flood risk appraisal and no strategic green infrastructure framework that considers the three options together.

This matters enormously. If all three SDGOs were to come forward, even partially, the combined pressure on Fordingbridge’s limited road network, its schools, its healthcare provision and its ecological setting would be substantially greater than the sum of the individual assessments. The plan offers no mechanism for managing this.

Landscape and Heritage: More Than a Constraint to List

The document acknowledges that the SDGOs sit in a genuinely sensitive landscape context. SDGO M occupies the open flood plain of the Avon Valley, directly opposite the New Forest National Park. SDGO N is described as “flat and expansive in character” and associated with a meander in the River Avon. SDGO O encompasses land around Fryern Court and is adjacent to the Breamore Conservation Area.

These are not minor sensitivities. The open character of the Avon Valley floodplain is the defining quality of Fordingbridge’s landscape setting and the primary source of the special interest of both the Fordingbridge and Bickton Conservation Areas. The document acknowledges that “any significant development will be highly prominent within the setting of the nearby Conservation Areas” and then proceeds to suggest 800 homes in that very location.

What is absent is any landscape capacity study that tests whether development at the proposed scale is compatible with these designations at all, let alone any design framework that might guide how built form, edge treatment and green infrastructure could begin to absorb that growth. Listing landscape sensitivity as a bullet point consideration is not a substitute for a landscape-led master planning approach that genuinely shapes the quantum and disposition of development.

Flood Risk: An Unresolved Fundamental

Both SDGO M and SDGO O include land within Flood Zones 2 and 3, with further areas expected to come under increased risk as climate change projections are refined. The document correctly notes that a Level 2 Strategic Flood Risk Assessment has not yet been completed and that “no conclusions could be drawn on the capacity of the site” until it is.

This is a significant admission. The plan is consulting on growth options for which the basic question of how much land is actually developable has not been answered. Presenting indicative housing numbers of 800 and 1,750 homes respectively before this assessment has been carried out risks anchoring public and political expectations to figures that may prove wholly unrealistic once flood risk is properly modelled. A more reliable approach would be to present these as genuinely contingent options pending the evidence, rather than headlining housing numbers as if they were established capacities.

Ecology and Nature: Bat Surveys Are Not A Strategy

The ecological considerations section is largely identical across all three SDGOs, centred on the River Avon’s international nature conservation designations and the Avon Valley bat survey findings. The recommended responses i.e. targeted surveys, hedgerow restoration, and dark corridors, are sensible as far as they go, but they describe the beginning of an ecological assessment process, not its conclusion.

The document does not address how recreational pressure from potentially 1,800 new households would be managed in relation to the internationally designated River Avon sites. Nutrient neutrality and recreational impact mitigation under the Habitats Regulations are among the most complex and time-consuming constraints facing development in this part of Hampshire yet the plan offers nothing beyond a one-line acknowledgement that they “should be considered.” Given the experience in other authority areas where Habitats Regulations obligations have significantly delayed and reduced development delivery, this lacuna is not a minor drafting omission; it is a potential threat to the entire growth strategy.

The A338 Barrier: A Strategic Problem Treated as a Technical Detail

Two of the three SDGOs – SDGO N and SDGO M – would expand Fordingbridge eastwards and beyond the A338 which the document acknowledges “could act as a significant barrier to integration.” This is an understatement. The A338 is a busy primary route and its severance effect on new communities to the east, south and north of the existing town would be profound if not addressed through deliberate and well-resourced design and infrastructure intervention.

The plan identifies this as something that “will need to be assessed and considered further.” That assessment should have preceded the identification of these options, not follow from it. Without a credible solution to the A338 crossing, whether through a new pedestrian priority grade-separated junction, a dedicated pedestrian and cycle bridge, or a comprehensive traffic management strategy, the aspiration for non-car-based connectivity between the new neighbourhoods and the existing town centre remains aspirational in the weakest sense.

Infrastructure: Headings Are Not a Delivery Plan

The infrastructure requirements listed for each SDGO are identical in structure and almost identical in content: highways, cycling and walking, bus services, schools, healthcare, utilities, biodiversity contributions. These are appropriate categories, but the document provides no costings, no phasing logic, no assessment of existing capacity or deficit, and no indication of which items are pre-conditions for development, and which could follow from it.

This matters practically as well as analytically. The combined demand on primary and secondary school places from 1,800 new homes would be substantial and would likely require at least one new primary school and potentially secondary school expansion, yet there is no indication of whether sites have been identified, what the funding gap might be, or how delivery would be programmed relative to occupation of new homes. The same applies to healthcare, where GP and primary care capacity in Fordingbridge is already understood to be under pressure.

A plan that is serious about sustainable delivery should be setting out, at minimum, an Infrastructure Delivery Plan that sequences investment alongside housing delivery. The current text does not approach that standard.

What Is Missing: A Place-Making Framework

Taken together, the SDGOs around Fordingbridge describe a significant expansion of a small market town in a sensitive natural and heritage landscape, with unresolved flood risk, substantial ecological constraints, a major road barrier to integration, and infrastructure needs that have been listed but not costed or planned.

What is absent is any overarching place-making vision that would give confidence that the sum of these parts could become a coherent, well-connected and genuinely liveable extension of Fordingbridge. A responsible approach to growth at this scale would include, at a minimum:

  • A Fordingbridge Growth Framework that tests the combined capacity of all three SDGOs, establishes their inter-relationships, and sets out a sequencing logic for delivery.
  • A landscape and visual impact assessment that tests development quantum against the specific sensitivities of the Avon Valley floodplain setting.
  • A Level 2 Strategic Flood Risk Assessment completed before housing numbers are published.
  • A Habitats Regulations Assessment scoping exercise that honestly appraises the deliverability of the growth strategy in the context of the River Avon’s international designations.
  • An A338 movement study that identifies credible solutions to permeability across the road corridor before options are consulted upon.
  • A design code or character framework that establishes principles for how new development relates to the historic town, the floodplain and the adjacent New Forest National Park setting.

The Regulation 18 consultation is the right moment to raise these expectations. Without a substantially stronger evidence base and a more integrated planning and design framework, the risk is that these SDGOs deliver housing numbers on paper while failing to deliver the healthy, connected and sustainable places that both the community and the natural environment of the Avon Valley deserve.

Neighbourhood Planning as a Strategic Partner: Fordingbridge

The Opportunity at This Moment

The Regulation 18 consultation stage is precisely the right moment for NFDC to consider how a neighbourhood plan for Fordingbridge fits into the planning picture. The Local Plan has identified the town as a focus for significant growth but has, as this critique sets out, left most of the hard questions unanswered. That gap is not simply a weakness in the district council’s evidence base. It is also an invitation for a well-prepared, community-led neighbourhood plan, developed with professional support, to step into that space and shape the answers on behalf of the people who will actually live with the consequences.

Neighbourhood plans prepared under the Localism Act 2011 carry genuine statutory weight. Once made, they form part of the development plan and decisions must be taken in accordance with them. That is not a consultative role, it is a co-authoring role. Fordingbridge has the opportunity to be an active architect of its own future rather than a passive recipient of growth imposed from above.

What a Neighbourhood Plan Can Do That a Local Plan Cannot

A Local Plan necessarily operates at the district scale. It allocates land, sets policy frameworks and identifies strategic infrastructure requirements, but it cannot, and should not attempt to, resolve the fine-grained questions of character, connectivity, community need and place quality that determine whether growth succeeds or fails at the human scale. That is precisely where a neighbourhood plan is most powerful.

For Fordingbridge specifically, a neighbourhood plan could do the following.

Establish a community-owned vision for growth

Rather than leaving the definition of what Fordingbridge should become to a district authority document prepared at arm’s length, a neighbourhood plan gives the community the chance to articulate its own spatial vision: how the town should grow, in what direction, at what pace, and to what standard. That vision, expressed in plan policy and supported by evidence gathered with and from local people, becomes a material consideration that any future planning application must address. This work has already been addressed in some detail in 2025 by the Fordingbridge Neighbourhood Plan steering group.

Set meaningful design standards

The Local Plan extract is silent on design quality. A neighbourhood plan can fill that void directly, establishing locally specific design codes or guidance that respond to the distinctive character of Fordingbridge: its relationship with the Avon, its historic core, its market town grain, the qualities of the floodplain setting. These standards can go well beyond the generic requirements of national policy and set a genuinely high bar for any development that comes forward on the SDGO sites.

Protect what matters most

Through the neighbourhood plan process, the community can designate Local Green Spaces, identify important views, define settlement boundaries and establish the landscape buffers needed to prevent the coalescence of Fordingbridge with surrounding villages and hamlets, a specific concern raised in relation to SDGO O. These designations carry real planning weight and can be robustly defended at appeal. Again, work on developing protective planning policies is already underway, being led by the Fordingbridge Neighbourhood Plan steering group.

Define the infrastructure that development must deliver

A neighbourhood plan can set out, in community terms, what infrastructure is genuinely needed before or alongside growth, not as a generic list of contribution categories, but as specific, evidenced and prioritised requirements grounded in an understanding of what Fordingbridge currently lacks and what new communities will need. This is a much stronger platform for negotiation with developers than the standardised infrastructure headings that currently appear in the Local Plan.

Allocate smaller sites and manage windfall development

Alongside the large SDGO options, the Local Plan identifies smaller sites of between 10 and 99 dwellings. A neighbourhood plan can make its own site allocations within the parish, providing certainty about where more modest, organic growth is welcome and on what terms. This gives the community agency over the incremental changes that will happen regardless of whether the larger SDGOs are progressed.

The Engagement Process as an Act of Place-Making in Itself

A professionally supported but genuinely community-led neighbourhood planning process is not simply a means to an end. Done well, the process of preparing the plan is itself an act of place-making: one that builds social capital, deepens local understanding of the town’s character and constraints, and creates the shared language needed to engage constructively with developers, the district council and other statutory bodies.

For Fordingbridge, this matters particularly because the scale of growth being proposed could be deeply divisive if it arrives without a process of genuine civic deliberation. The risk of communities feeling that growth has “been done to them” rather than “shaped by them” is real and well-documented. A neighbourhood plan reverses that dynamic. It positions the community not as an objector (reactive, defensive and easily dismissed) but as a proactive partner that has done its research, articulated its values and set clear expectations.

Our engagement reaches well beyond the self-selecting minority who typically attend planning consultations. We have a well-run neighbourhood planning process already underway, using diverse methods e.g. design workshops, walking audits, digital engagement, school and youth involvement, already building a genuinely representative picture of what the community values about Fordingbridge and what it wants from its future. That breadth of participation also strengthens the plan’s democratic legitimacy, which matters when it is tested at examination.

Addressing the Specific Gaps Identified in the Local Plan

The critique of the Local Plan extract identified several areas where the evidence base and policy framework were inadequate. A neighbourhood plan is well placed to address each of them:

  • On landscape and design, the neighbourhood plan process can commission a locally specific landscape character assessment and visual sensitivity study, developed with community input, that provides an honest account of where development can be absorbed and where it cannot. This becomes the foundation for design policies that are rooted in place rather than generic aspiration.
  • On movement and the A338, the community is ideally positioned to define what non-car connectivity between any new neighbourhoods, and the existing town centre should look like in practice e.g. which crossings matter, which routes should be prioritised, what quality of walking and cycling environment is acceptable. These community-defined standards can be embedded in neighbourhood plan policy and used to hold any future planning applications to account.
  • On green and blue infrastructure, a neighbourhood plan can translate the broad commitments of the NFDC Green Blue Infrastructure report into locally specific proposals, identifying the paths, corridors, open spaces and ecological features that matter most to the people of Fordingbridge, and setting out how development should protect, enhance and extend them. This is far more powerful than a generic policy requirement to make a financial contribution.
  • On community facilities and local services, the neighbourhood plan process provides the opportunity to conduct a proper assessment of what Fordingbridge currently has, what it is missing, and what additional growth would require. That evidence base, gathered with and from the community, creates a much stronger foundation for negotiating the delivery of schools, healthcare, community spaces and local employment from any future development than the current Local Plan text provides.

The Relationship with the Local Plan: Partnership, Not Competition

It is important to be clear that a Neighbourhood Plan works with the Local Plan, not against it. A neighbourhood plan cannot prevent the district council from allocating housing in the Local Plan, and nor should it try. What it can do is shape how those allocations are defined, what standards they must meet, what infrastructure must accompany them, and how the resulting places relate to the existing town.

The most effective neighbourhood plans are those that engage constructively with the strategic framework being set at district level while adding the local specificity and community voice that only the neighbourhood scale can provide. For Fordingbridge, that means engaging actively with the Regulation 18 consultation, setting out clearly and evidentially what the community’s concerns are, what questions the Local Plan has failed to answer, and what a neighbourhood plan could contribute, while simultaneously continuing the process of preparing that plan.

If the Local Plan proceeds to allocate one or more of the SDGO sites in its next iteration, a made neighbourhood plan will be the most effective tool available to Fordingbridge to ensure that growth is well-designed, properly supported by infrastructure, and genuinely integrated with the life of the existing town. Without it, the community’s ability to influence the detail of what gets built (and how) will be limited to individual planning applications, where the leverage is far weaker and the moment for shaping places has largely passed.

The Risk of Rushing: Why Eight Months Is Not Enough

A Timetable That Does Not Match the Task

The District Council’s intention to bring the Local Plan to its final, submission-ready state within eight months of the current Regulation 18 consultation closing is, on any reading of the evidence, an extremely ambitious timetable. Given the scale of the unresolved issues identified in the Spatial Options document, and the depth of the evidence base work that would need to be completed before those issues can be honestly resolved, it is not simply ambitious. It is, we believe, as things currently stand, unrealistic.

This is not a procedural observation. It is a substantive one. The gap between where this Local Plan currently sits and where it needs to be to withstand independent examination is wide. Closing that gap properly will take time, expertise, rigorous evidence gathering and genuine community engagement. Eight months does not provide sufficient room for any of those things to be done to the standard that the planning system, and the communities affected, have every right to expect.

What Remains Unresolved

To understand why the timetable is so pressured, it is worth being precise about what the current document has left undone. This is not a plan that is almost finished and in need of minor refinement. It is a plan that has identified growth options of transformational scale while leaving the fundamental questions about their deliverability largely unanswered.

For Fordingbridge alone, the following pieces of work remain outstanding or are explicitly acknowledged as incomplete within the document itself:

  • A Level 2 Strategic Flood Risk Assessment has not been completed, yet flood risk affects significant parts of two of the three SDGO sites and directly determines how much land is actually developable.
  • A Habitats Regulations Assessment that honestly appraises the cumulative impact of up to 2,850 new homes on the internationally designated River Avon sites has not been scoped, let alone completed.
  • No landscape capacity study has been undertaken to test whether development at the proposed scale is compatible with the Avon Valley setting, the New Forest National Park setting, or the character of the Fordingbridge and Bickton Conservation Areas.
  • No transport study has assessed the combined traffic impact of all three growth options on the A338 corridor, nor has any credible solution to the barrier that road presents to community integration been identified.
  • No Infrastructure Delivery Plan exists that sequences the provision of schools, healthcare, walking and cycling infrastructure and public transport alongside housing delivery. No cumulative assessment of the three SDGOs together, as a combined growth strategy for a small market town, has been carried out.

Each of these is a substantive and time-consuming piece of work in its own right. Collectively, they represent a programme of evidence base preparation that, in a complex environmental and heritage context like the Avon Valley, would typically take well over a year to commission, complete, consult upon and translate into robust plan policy. To suggest that all of this can be accomplished, digested and reflected in a submission-ready plan within eight months is to invite either a very significant reduction in the ambition of the growth strategy or a plan that goes to inspection under-prepared.

What Local Plan Inspection Requires

It is worth being direct about what the independent inspection process will demand. A Local Plan inspector is required to assess whether the plan is legally compliant, positively prepared, justified, effective and consistent with national policy. These are not formalities. They are substantive tests that inspectors apply with rigour, and recent examination experience across England has demonstrated that plans which arrive at examination with unresolved evidence gaps, inadequately justified allocations or poorly tested infrastructure assumptions do not pass quietly. They are found unsound.

The consequences of a plan being found unsound at examination are serious and long-lasting. The plan either returns to the council for modification, a process that can take years, or it fails altogether, leaving the district without an up-to-date development plan. In either case, the communities that were supposed to benefit from a clear, well-evidenced plan are left exposed.

For the Fordingbridge SDGOs specifically, the examination risks are acute. An inspector examining SDGO M, N or O would ask, among other things, whether the flood risk has been properly assessed and whether the developable area has been accurately calculated; whether the Habitats Regulations implications have been adequately addressed; whether the landscape and heritage impacts have been tested against a credible evidence base; whether the infrastructure required to support the growth has been identified, costed and shown to be deliverable; and whether the cumulative impact of growth across all three options has been considered in the round. On the basis of the current document, none of those questions can be answered satisfactorily. That is not a minor gap. It is the kind of evidential deficit that inspectors identify in their initial questions and that, if not resolved, leads to findings of unsoundness.

The precedent here is important. In recent years a number of local plans across England have been found unsound or withdrawn from examination precisely because their evidence base was inadequate, their infrastructure assumptions were untested, or their allocations could not be demonstrated to be deliverable. New Forest District Council will be aware of these cases. The lesson they carry is consistent: the time saved by rushing a plan to examination is routinely lost many times over in the delay and disruption that follows when it fails.

The Particular Vulnerability of Fordingbridge

If the Local Plan is found unsound, or if it is withdrawn from examination and returns to an earlier stage of preparation, the consequences for Fordingbridge would be disproportionately serious. This is because the town already sits in an exposed position in relation to speculative development pressure.

Fordingbridge has an attractive setting, a constrained road network that has not deterred developers in the past, a settlement hierarchy position that has historically made it a target for strategic allocations, and, as the Town Council’s Issues and Scope representations made clear, a track record of absorbing more growth than its infrastructure can comfortably support. Without the protection of an up to date, and formally adopted Local Plan, the town becomes significantly more vulnerable to planning applications that arrive outside the framework of any coherent spatial strategy.

The National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) is unambiguous on this point. Where a local planning authority cannot demonstrate a five-year housing land supply, the policies most important for determining applications are deemed out of date and the presumption in favour of sustainable development applies. In practical terms, this means that developers can bring forward applications on unallocated sites and have a materially stronger prospect of success at appeal. The planning inspector in those appeal cases is not weighing the application against a clear, adopted spatial strategy for the town. They are weighing it against a much weaker policy framework, in which the developer’s arguments carry greater force and the community’s ability to resist inappropriate development is significantly diminished.

This is not a theoretical risk for Fordingbridge. It is the situation in which the town will find itself if the Local Plan fails at examination, and it is a situation that, given the current state of the evidence base, is a real and foreseeable possibility if the eight-month timetable is adhered to regardless of readiness.

The Case for Getting It Right Over Getting It Done

There is an understandable institutional pressure on local planning authorities to move quickly. Government policy has made clear its expectations around plan-making timescales, and the political and reputational costs of a slow plan are real. But those pressures need to be weighed against the costs of a plan that fails, costs that fall not on the institution, but on the communities it is supposed to serve.

For Fordingbridge, getting this right matters enormously. The scale of growth being proposed, if it is to come forward at all, must be supported by an evidence base that is transparent about constraints, an infrastructure framework that is genuinely deliverable, a design and landscape approach that is proportionate to the sensitivity of the setting, and a policy framework that reflects the legitimate concerns of a community that has engaged seriously and in good faith with the planning process for years.

A Local Plan that reaches examination before that work is done is not a plan that protects Fordingbridge. It is a plan that puts Fordingbridge at risk: of unsound allocations, of speculative development in the vacuum that examination failure creates, and of a further cycle of growth without the infrastructure, the design quality and the community voice that sustainable development genuinely requires.

The District Council should be candid with itself, with the Secretary of State, and with the communities it serves: if eight months is not enough time to prepare this plan properly, then the right response is to take the time that is needed and not rush.

The people of Fordingbridge deserve better than that.

Fordingbridge Town Council is committed to continuing the preparation of the Fordingbridge Neighbourhood Plan so that the community can play a constructive role in shaping the town’s future.

If growth is to occur in Fordingbridge, it must be properly planned, appropriately scaled, and supported by the infrastructure, environmental protection and design quality necessary to create a sustainable and thriving market town for future generations.

The Town Council would welcome the District Council’s thoughts on the points raised in this submission.