The Board heard about One Plymouth, a group comprising the key partnership leads in the City whose purpose was to ensure there is a strategic and holistic approach to delivering services, helping inward investment and maintaining development of the City to ensure it provides a sustainable environment, economy and services fit for the future of its citizens. 

Members welcomed Richard Grant and Caroline Marr from Plymouth City Council who were in attendance to provide a briefing on the Plymouth Plan.  The Plan will be a single strategic plan for the city, looking ahead to 2031 and beyond and will bring together all the city’s long term strategic plans into one place and will deliver a full review of the current Local Development Framework Core Strategy.  This coordinated approach will allow the city to have a single voice on its strategic priorities and help all key partners to pull together in the same direction.

The Board heard that a large consultation event ‘Plymouth Conversation’ had taken place over a six- month period last year using a sofa to encourage people to sit and talk to officers expressing their views on what the Plan should say and what they thought the city would be like at the end of the Plan in 2031.  This culminated in the Plymouth Plan convention in the City Centre Shop, which had been themed around the topics identified in the consultation, and generated over 4,000 separate comments.

An evidence base, underpinned by solid facts, had now been established and the next phase of consultations ‘Plymouth Plan Connections’ had commenced and would continue over the summer.  The timeline for bringing the Plan into effect was as follows –

·         Plymouth Plan Connections – Summer 2014 (area assessments, evidence base and topic papers published summer 2014 and running until 24 October 2014)

·         Plymouth Plan (Part One – Strategies) Consultation Draft presented to Cabinet in December 2014

·         Plymouth Plan (allocations and designations) – 2015

·         Single Plymouth Plan – pre-submission consultation – by January 2016

·         Plymouth Plan submitted to Government – by April 2016

The Chair thanked the officers for the briefing and suggested members give thought to what the Safer Plymouth Partnership would like to see in the Plan, bearing in mind the community safety thread.

It was highlighted that the students at Plymouth University formed a large part of the city’s demographic and had a number of student forums where the consultation could be fed in.  It was suggested that a useful engagement exercise could involve bringing the Plymouth sofa to the student’s union. 

Similarly, the representatives from Neighbourhood Watch and the Octopus Project (ZEBRA) offered to act as direct links to their organisations for the purposes of widening engagement in the consultation process.

Sarah Hopkins reinforced the Chair’s comment and suggested that, as community safety did not have its own specific topic paper, members ought to give thought to whether one was required.

Caroline Marr responded that it would be worth looking at the consultation paper to determine whether there was a need for a separate topic paper or if the theme already ran through it adequately.  In addition, Richard Grant advised that there was a health and wellbeing themed topic paper and area assessments had picked up many community issues, the Board may want to look at that first and feedback any comments.

Other points of discussion included –

·         cities who had adopted similar plans – examples of models held up as good practice included Portland, Oregon in the USA, and Glasgow;

·         the population required to deliver the plan as highlighted in Abercrombie’s vision for the City was 300,000

The Safer Plymouth Partnership welcomed the plan, acknowledging the importance of involving people in shaping the future of their city, and agreed that –