What does this mean? On 12^th September, 2014 HPPG’s application for Direct Support from Locality was approved!

It means that HPPG has been allocated a consultant from Planning Aid England who will provide us with Specialist Planning Support over the next six months by way of assistance and advice with:

Project Management

Community Engagement

Building the Evidence Base for the Plan

Plan Development and Writing

This is excellent news for the group as we will now have the benefit of expert advice from a professional planning consultant who will guide us through the next, very important, steps in building the Highams Park Plan.

 Who will pay for this?

The Department for Communities and Local Government (DCLG) has made £10.5m available to provide support and grants to neighbourhood planning groups. We applied for Direct Support through Locality and were awarded the support outlined above. This support will cost HPPG nothing and is in addition to the £20,000 “frontrunner” grant already received from DCLG and held by the Council on our behalf.

Who are Locality?

Locality is a national network of over 700 community-led organisations and 200 associate partners. DCLG provides the funding for Locality to run a programme called “The Supporting Communities and Neighbourhoods in Planning Programme” to help local groups develop neighbourhood plans.

A Launch Event took place on Saturday 16th November 2013 to explain the plan to local people and to seek volunteers to help create the plan. The Event had the tag line “Our Highams Park – Shaping the Future”.

The Launch Event was considered a huge success, with around 400 people attending. People left contact details and the organisers are now dealing with the practical matters of organising the impressive army of volunteers to work on the plan. This is well in hand and work on the plan proper will begin in January (2014).

The links below contain a selection of videos and documents which help explain the plan and might interest you:

1) A slide show was shown at the Launch Event to explain all about the Highams Park Plan.

2) After the slide show, visitors were invited to view a series of display boards showing suggestions for topics the plan might cover. Under these topics, visitors were encouraged to pin up ideas to be included in the plan. To give you a feel for what went on, a random selection of topics and ideas has been collated into a short video.(and yes, I know, the bouncing is very irritating !)

3) Click on the images below to see larger copies of the launch event publicity leaflet and the ideas tree.

4) If I volunteer, how much time will it take? The Answer is: “As much or as little as you can spare”. Even a small amount would be valuable. The following diagram shows how the volunteers might be organised. You’ll see that there’s lots of scope for different levels of involvement: HPPRolesV4

5) Visitors to the event were handed a contact form to fill in to register their interest in the project. If you’d like to get involved please email your details to us and we’ll get in touch. Don’t worry about trying to fill in the form electronically.
Click here if you’d like to see the form: HPPcontact

6) Visitors to the event were handed a takeaway leaflet as they left, both as a reminder and for them to give to neighbours who couldn’t attend.
Click here to see the Takeaway leaflet: HPPtakeaway