Email Template for GNLP 2045

Please do not paste this unchanged. Fill the brackets, delete any paragraph that is not true for you, or add one sentence about a road, path or service you actually use. A short personal email is more use than a perfect copy of someone else’s.

To: GNLP@norfolk.gov.uk

Subject: GNLP 2045 Regulation 20 Scoping Consultation — comments from [village / estate]

Dear GNLP 2045 team,

Please accept this as a response to the Regulation 20 scoping consultation.

I live at [full address] and I support the need for a new plan that can meet Greater Norwich’s housing requirement. My concern is how that growth is located. I would like the strategy and the evidence to steer homes towards places that already have, or can realistically be given, the roads, sewers, schools and services to match — and away from a river-valley country park and a nutrient-constrained catchment.

Please add me to the list for later stages, including Regulation 23 in 2027.

Name: [full name]

Address: [full postal address]

Email: [email]

Question 6 — where additional growth is appropriate, and what should come first

Greater Norwich will need more homes. The plan should look first at:

• previously developed land and regeneration sites inside the built-up area

• places where wastewater treatment, public transport, GPs and schools already have spare capacity, or a funded plan to create it

• greenfield land only where there is already a working road network and the site is not hard against a nutrient-sensitive river catchment or a protected green-infrastructure allocation such as the country park at Bawburgh and Colney Lakes (Policy S.BA.1)

A dual carriageway nearby is not, on its own, a growth strategy. New housing should be able to use existing access at peak hours, or a funded improvement, rather than adding unviable traffic to New Road, Barnard Road and the A47 junctions by default, as site 25801 would do.

Before a location is called appropriate, the plan should be able to show: treatment capacity and a nutrient solution that exist rather than a later contribution; school and GP places arriving with the homes; and bus or cycle links to jobs so the site is not car-dependent from day one. Where a site sits next to an existing country park or wildlife site, extra public greenspace should be identified first.

Locations that cannot show that should wait for the 2027 site assessment. They should not be treated as available simply because they sit on the urban edge.

Question 16 — services, wastewater and net zero

Foul drainage from this side of the city generally runs to Whitlingham Water Recycling Centre. Surface water and treated effluent sit in the River Yare catchment of The Broads SAC, which is already subject to nutrient neutrality. Those two facts should decide whether more housing is steered into the New Road / Town House Road / Bawburgh Lakes / Colney area, not the other way round.

An upgrade promised for the 2030s is not the same as spare capacity now. The evidence should say whether Whitlingham can take the combined load from the whole group of promoted sites, and how nutrient neutrality would be met for the Yare / Broads catchment as one system.

Putting a large new estate on the valley edge also makes net-zero harder if most trips are by car. Energy-efficient houses do not cancel that out. Growth that can use existing public transport and short journeys to work should be preferred.

Question 17 — nature recovery and greenspace

I support the strongest water-efficiency standards the plan can set. Those standards do not make a constrained valley a good place for a new cluster of homes.

The adopted plan already sets aside about 73.5 hectares south of New Road as a water-based country park (S.BA.1), with public access, path links and a conservation plan for the County Wildlife Site. That allocation dates from 2015 and has still not been delivered. The new plan should complete and extend that corridor, not wrap housing around it.

If more homes are contemplated next to that park, the plan should first identify other large, natural public greenspace (SANG) so new residents are not simply sent to the lakes, Charter Wood and the valley paths. The country park should not be counted as both a neighbour and the mitigation.

Question 19 — evidence

Please assess the promoted land around New Road, Bawburgh Lakes, Colney and Little Melton as a group, not as separate fields.

That work should include, for the whole corridor: flood and surface water; wastewater and nutrient neutrality, naming the treatment works; visitor use of the allocated country park; and GP, school and community capacity in Costessey, Bowthorpe and Bawburgh.

Waiting until 2027 to notice the combined effect would be too late to shape the growth strategy.

Question 22 — anything else

I am not asking you to determine any one Call for Sites parcel at this stage. I am asking that this stretch of the Yare is treated as a constraint in the strategy and in the evidence programme, so that the 2027 sites consultation is not starting from a blank map.

Yours faithfully,

[name]