Places for Everyone Examination in Public

The New Carrington Hearing will be held on 1st March – you can watch the Hearing live (or the recording afterwards) here.

The Examination website and all the documents being reviewed are available here.

You will find the recordings of the Hearings and a useful summary of each session on the GMCA website here.

We have also responded to the Planning Inspectors’ question about Viability – you can find a copy here.

FOCM has responded to questions in Matters 1-12 (the Policies in the P4E Plan) and Matter 23 (the New Carrington Allocation) – click on the links below to see our responses:

Matter 1
Matter 2
Matter 3
Matter 4
Matter 5
Matter 6
Matter 7
Matter 8
Matter 9
Matter 10
Matter 11
Matter 12
Matter 23

The Planning Inspectors issued their Matters, Issues and Questions (known as MIQs) in July 2022, with responses due back in September and October 2022. The Hearings commence in November 2022, the details of the individual sessions have been published here.

The Places for Everyone Examination in Public began in February 2022 and the Planning Inspectors began issuing questions to the GMCA in March 2022. You can find the details of all their questions and other communications on the Examination in Public website here.

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Places for Everyone Next Steps (21st December 2021):
Our Chair and other representatives of the Save Greater Manchester’s Green Belts group recently met with representatives from the Greater Manchester Combined Authority.  The key points from the meeting are as follows:

• The GMCA had around 4,000 responses to the Regulation 19 consultation
• They are in the process of appointing the Programme Officers to support the Examination in Public (they are two very experienced ladies called:
  • Yvonne Parker
  • Helen Wilson
• Any engagement we have with the Planning Inspectors would be via these Programme Officers
• The GMCA expect to submit the consolidated response to the Secretary of State in January or early February
• They expect the Government to appoint a panel of three inspectors
• The hearings are likely to be from July 2022 onward (but there will be no sessions in August)
  • They will be 3 weeks on and one week off
  • They will be held Tuesdays to Thursdays inclusive
  • The GMCA are considering hybrid sessions (both online and face to face options available) – we will know more nearer the time
  • The legal issues are likely to be taken first (Duty to Cooperate, etc)
  • Discussions about the Allocations (such as New Carrington) may not take place until September

We are also meeting regularly with other groups who have extensive experience in Examinations in Public to support our preparation activities.  The FOCM Committee will discuss what professional advice we may need in the new year and will keep you updated about our planned approach.

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The latest consultation began on 9th August 2021 and ran until 3rd October 2021. This was a Regulation 19 Consultation, which means that the soundness and legal compliance of the Places for Everyone documentation was assessed by those who responded. Find out more in the 6th September 2021 meeting slides below.

We submitted our response to the latest Places for Everyone Consultation on 3rd October 2021, you can download it by clicking on the buttons below:

The next step is for the GMCA to collate all the responses received (these are known as Representations) and the Plan, together with those Representations, will be sent to the Secretary of State, who will appoint a Planning Inspector (or in this case a number of Planning Inspectors) to oversee the Examination of the Plan. The GMCA are expecting around 9 Planning Inspectors to be involved in the examination process – so if you spot some repetition in the document, this was deliberate as we are unsure how the review of responses will be handled.

We will provide more information as it becomes available.

Please also take a look at what the P4E responses below say about the New Carrington Development:

In addition, the Natural Environment Topic Paper includes guidance from Natural England (page 39, paragraph 3.53) about the importance of our soils, such as those found on Carrington Moss.

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At our public meeting on 6th September, we talked about how to respond to the Regulation 19 consultation for the Places for Everyone Plan. There is also guidance on the GMCA website and the Save Greater Manchester’s Green Belt Group website.

The pack below, which was used at the meeting, provides guidance about making your response and information about some potential key areas of focus that you can include in your representation. We looked at ways of demonstrating that the plan is not sound or legally compliant and at the ways in which you propose your modifications.

We also looked at some facts and figures that you can find in the documentation and whether they demonstrate that the Plan is sound (or not).

We’ll be discussing our final response at our public meeting on 28th September 2021 (6pm).

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At our public meeting on 28th January 2021, we discussed the initial feedback from our community survey about Trafford’s New Carrington Masterplan, Trafford’s Consultation on the Carrington Link Road proposals and Trafford’s Consultation on the Trafford Local Plan. Click on the button below to see the information we presented. Don’t hesitate to contact us with any questions.

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The Greater Manchester Spatial Framework has been renamed Places for Everyone because Stockport Council voted against the release of green belt in their area in December 2020.

At our public meeting on 28th December 2020, we provided an update on the latest information we have about the GMSF, Trafford’s Local Plan and our alternative strategies for Carrington Moss. We recorded the presentation and you can listen to it on the button below.

The latest iteration (23rd October 2020) of the GMSF documents have been issued for review. There are over 150 documents (comprising over 14,000 pages) to look at. Of these, over 80 documents (over 9,000 pages) need to be looked at to fully review the local allocation (which is called New Carrington) . This is not community engagement. Developers and landowners have been involved in the creation and evolution of these plans. Residents, community groups and Parish Councils have been excluded from the discussions until the GMSF was issued. This is not our plan!

If you have not done so already, do take a look at the New Carrington Masterplan, which impacts Broadheath, Dunham, Partington, Sale West and Warburton as well as Carrington (click on the red button below to see more detail about what is proposed).

You may have already seen our recent video, which outlines our Alternative Transformation Strategy for Carrington Moss, our aim is to restore as much of our own local peatland as possible.

Following our online community workshop (held on 28th October) we have continued to identify available brownfield sites in Trafford. As with the Transport Strategy, we don’t want to just reject the plans that have been developed, we’d like to create alternative proposals so we can demonstrate that there is NO requirement for Trafford to release green belt land. We have identified a list of alternative sites which we are discussing with Trafford. In the meantime, we are keen to be notified of any sites you may know about (we’d rather have the same suggestions twice than not have them at all).  The links to Trafford’s Brownfield register and to the list of applications with Planning Permission are below, along with a contact form, so you can send us your ideas.

We are also developing our alternative Transformation Strategy for Carrington Moss, which will be presented to residents at our community meeting on 28th December 2020 (see our Events page for more information). This alternative Transformation Strategy focuses on the opportunity for Carrington Moss to become a carbon and biodiversity bank, maximising income for landowners and improving Trafford’s woeful position in terms of biodiversity units per hectare.

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Regarding the previous draft of the GMSF:
The Friends group did a detailed response to the GMSF documents, following an in depth review of the materials issued on 21st January 2019.

Friends of Carrington Moss Response to the GMSF

Key themes in our response

We were delighted to read that “The ultimate measure of the plan’s success will be whether it has helped to enhance the lives of all residents within Greater Manchester”!

The key themes in our response included:

• The GMSF should be revised to a 15 year plan – this would mean NO green belt loss is necessary anywhere in Greater Manchester
• We would like to see a true Brownfield first approach, with a more in depth exercise to be carried out (which fully engages the public) to identify additional brownfield sites – the CPRE are supporting this and have recently published their report which shows that there is enough suitable brownfield land available in England for more than 1 million homes across over 18,000 sites
  https://www.cpre.org.uk/resources/housing-and-planning/planning/item/5086-state-of-brownfield-2019
• The GMSF strategy should focus on unmet housing NEED – it currently seems to be very developer-led
• Climate change, air quality and the importance of our natural environment should be at the forefront of decision-making, there should be NO builds on any carbon capturing peat mosses, and red listed birds and endangered wildlife should be protected
• The Transport 2040 Strategy should put walking, cycling and public transport first (HS2 should not be supported – it is inconsistent with GMSF policies), more effort should be made to identify initiatives to make the car less attractive
• There are many inequities and inconsistencies in the plan – we will highlight these in our blog over the coming weeks
• Communication of the plan has, once again, been very, very poor and left for community-minded individuals and community groups to fund and deliver!

To access the GMSF documents issued on 21st January 2019, please click on this link
https://www.greatermanchester-ca.gov.uk/what-we-do/housing/greater-manchester-spatial-framework/gmsf-documents/

The plan for New Carrington is available at this link
https://www.trafford.gov.uk/planning/strategic-planning/docs/GMSF-FAQs/New-Carrington-Framework-Plan.pdf