Dore Neighbourhood Plan

Dore successfully prepared a Dore Neighbourhood Plan which was adopted by both Sheffield City Council and The Peak District National Park Authority as part of their Local Plans in autumn 2021.

The text of the finally adopted Dore Neighbourhood Plan can be viewed here. (This is a PDF file).

As long ago as 2005 the Dore Village Society was foresighted enough to produce a Village Design Statement after wide community consultation. It provided a firm basis for reacting to planning applications (as the DVS has continued to do for many years), but it had no formal status within the UK planning system. When Parliament passed the Localism Act in 2011 the Society identified a future route by which it could translate and develop its earlier thinking into a document which would carry weight in planning circles – setting out to produce a Neighbourhood Plan for Dore as the legislation now allowed.

It was accepted by both Sheffield City Council (SCC) and the Peak District National Park Authority (PDNPA) that the entire membership of the DVS (around 1,000 members) would be regarded as the Neighbourhood Forum for the purposes of preparing a Dore Neighbourhood Plan. In November 2015 the Forum met to agree the basis on which the Plan should be prepared and established a Steering Group to carry out the work. Over the next 6 years that Steering Group met formally at least 54 times, organised community consultations, created several special working groups, carried out extensive research, met external interested parties, negotiated with the SCC and PDNPA, prepared consultative comments on successive drafts of SCC’s developing new Sheffield-wide Local Planning documents and gradually produced a full draft Neighbourhood Plan which was endorsed by the Neighbourhood Forum. This work is reflected in the minutes of the Steering Group Minutes, the minutes of the Working Group meetings, various guidance letters, public feedback notes and a library of documents consulted which are laid out in the following pages.

Once we had a settled draft we had to consult widely externally as the neighbourhood planning regulations required and appropriately modify our text for fresh Forum approval. That draft is available to see below. Even then the task was not complete, because the draft had to be submitted by SCC to an appointed independent Examiner which led to substantial amendments. The revised draft was then put to a Referendum of all Dore electors conducted on 12 August 2021. That Referendum approved the text by 93% to 7% in favour. Subsequently both Sheffield City Council and the Peak District National Park Authority formally adopted the Dore Neighbourhood Plan which now forms part of their existing Local Plans.

Not content to rest on their laurels, the DVS Committee resolved to establish a team to follow up one of the major Aspirations set out in Annex A to the Dore Neighbourhood Plan, viz. to prepare a Green Infrastructure Strategy for Dore. The newly formed Green Infrastructure Strategy Team (GIST) started work in spring 2022.

It needs to be remembered that a Neighbourhood Plan only continues to survive as long as it remains consistent with the policies laid out in the Local Planning Authority’s existing Local Plan, SCC has for many years being steeling itself to prepare and finalise an up to date Local Plan to replace its existing increasingly out of date Plan. At the end of 2022 SCC published its draft new Local Plan and the DVS Committee and the Dore Neighbourhood Forum Steering Group formally commented on it as detailed in these pages.

Select 1 to 5 in the menu for the part of the process that you are interested in.