POLICY W7: LOCALLY SIGNIFICANT VIEWS

We are long term residents of Wallington, the owners of Wallington Chase and the adjacent paddock referred to in the Wallington Neighbourhood Plan (“WNP”) as Chase Meadow. As such we are interested landowners as it is proposed to designate our paddock as a Local Green Space (“LGS”) and a "significant view".

We attach our formal response to the WNP as part of the Regulation 16 Consultation for consideration by the Examiner.

We also attach our formal responses to the draft WNP which we submitted as part of the Regulation 14 consultation as these do not appear to have been appended to the Consultation Statement and are only referred to briefly in that statement.

As will be seen from our latest response, we object to several aspects of the WNP, and those objections are set out in the attachments. Despite being interested landowners, no-one from either the neighbourhood group set up to draft the plan, known as the Wallington Neighbourhood Plan Working Group ( “WNPWG”) nor the Parish Council have actively engaged with us at any time in the consultation process. The first indication we received of the LGS designation proposal for our field was when we received a formal notice of LGS designation by email from the Parish Clerk on 29th March 2022, two years after the Neighbourhood Planning Area was officially designated.

We submitted a detailed response to that notice as part of the Regulation 14 process and raised various concerns and questions, but heard nothing further from anyone until we received the round robin email to residents on 21st July 2023, 8 months later, giving notice that the WNP had been submitted for examination. Our concerns about the lack of consultation regarding the LGS designation of our paddock can be found at paragraphs 5.39 to 5.57 of the attached formal response.

Our attached submission also highlights that the WNP as submitted for examination has received minimal response from residents and the first stages of the Regulation 14 Consultation process took place through Covid lockdowns and restrictions.