North Northamptonshire Local Plan Gateway 1 Self-Assessment

Gateway 1 self-assessment summary

Date 14 October

How we got ready to prepare a new local plan

We formally started preparing a new local plan for North Northamptonshire on 14 October 2026. 

Government policy says we should adopt the new plan within 30 months of this date. This helps ensure we have an up-to-date local plan that responds to the needs of the area and our communities. 

This page explains what we've done to get ready to meet the 30-month timeframe.

The below link is to relevant pages on our website with information on the Local Plan process and associated documents:

New Local Plan for North Northamptonshire | North Northamptonshire Council

We have published a timetable for preparing the plan

The timetable shows when we expect to carry out the different stages and activities for preparing a plan. It helps us check if and how we can adopt the plan within the 30-month timeframe. We’ll keep this updated as we make more progress. 

Due to previous high levels of engagement from our residents, we anticipate that the analysis of the responses to the two forthcoming public consultations - consultation on proposed local plan content and evidence (anticipated during January/February 2027), and consultation on the proposed local plan (anticipated during October-December 2027), may take us some time to process.

To ensure we deliver our plan within 30 months, we: 

• have proactively engaged with stakeholders and community groups, both informally before publishing our notice of intention to commence (27 April 2026) and as part of our scoping consultation (20 May-1 July 2026)
• will promote the use of a digital response form to help us analyse the responses more efficiently

Engaging in this way has helped generate initial ideas and key issues to include within the plan.  It also ensured that stakeholders and residents had sight of the plan-making process and the requirements for the new plan-making system early on.  We will continue to work with these groups through our consultation periods.

We’re confident we will be able to adopt our plan within 30 months. 

View our local plan timetable. 

We have established project management and governance arrangements

Preparing a local plan involves many people across the council and from other organisations. Thinking early about how the work is planned, managed and signed off helps us: 

• check our progress and keep the work on track
• anticipate and manage any risks to us adopting the plan within 30 months 

We've developed a project plan and project team to help us prepare the plan in line with our local plan timetable and will meet regularly with our key decision makers to monitor how this is going. When we developed the project plan, we identified some risks to its delivery. We have reflected on these risks and identified things we can do to reduce these risks. The project plan will be regularly reviewed. We will keep the need for additional project management resource under review via our regular project working group meetings and risk assessment review. 

Guidance advises us: 

• to consider our governance procedures 
• to ensure we have efficient sign off processes in place with key decision makers 

We have established governance arrangements and are currently reviewing these in consultation with councillors and senior officers to ensure decisions are taken in a timely way. This may require increased levels of delegation to council officers through decision of the Executive or Full Council.  The ongoing development of the Local Plan is supported by the Local Plan Member Advisory Group (LPMAG) which usually meets monthly. This is a cross-party group of 10 elected Members and is chaired by the Portfolio Holder for Planning and Economic Growth. It is not a decision-making body but provides a consultative forum to support the progression of the local plan.

We used a project initiation document to help us manage the project. This is a template provided by the Planning Advisory Service that helps us consider the factors that we need to consider in advance of them taking place. This will be regularly reviewed and updated as the plan progresses. 

We planned how we will consult on the plan

Public consultation is essential for the local plan to represent the needs of our communities. It must be easy for people to have their say in a way that works for them, so they can influence the way the area develops. By planning this early, we can ensure people are aware in advance and can get involved from the start. 

We have undertaken a scoping consultation (20 May-1 July 2026) to get people’s views on what the plan could contain and how we propose to consult on the plan at key stages. Feedback included the need for complicated information to be presented more easily. 

We used this consultation to help us prepare an engagement strategy which will be finalised working with the consultation and engagement team and published alongside the proposed content and evidence document. This describes how we’ll consult and communicate with our communities as we continue to prepare the plan. As we are expecting significant engagement from our residents, we aim to provide a wide range of engagement opportunities. We have already undertaken some informal engagement activities and planned to increase our resource and use of digital software to analyse the responses in a timely manner. 

We have planned a mix of consultation and communication approaches to get more people involved, which is being developed into a comprehensive engagement strategy. This includes: 

• in-person sessions at appropriate locations in the Council’s area - particularly at later stages of plan preparation
• virtual meetings & workshops
• online activities including social media content

We want to move towards digital engagement, so you can expect to see us using new ways to engage.  We will use a bespoke online consultation portal to help analyse your responses more quickly and publish these on our website. 

You can find information about upcoming consultation activities on our website and social media channels. 

We began scoping out the content of the plan

Scoping includes considering how well the existing plan is working and gathering baseline information about the area. This helps to identify our future needs and ambitions. Starting this early means we can begin preparing the new plan with a clear vision, which makes it quicker and easier to consult on the plan and make decisions about it. 

To gain an understanding of the development needs for our area, we have looked at the existing evidence about our area and the people our plan needs to provide for and commissioned new evidence to inform this. We have also considered our current local plan and how well it has delivered for our communities and what may need changing. 

Using the information we have gathered along with the input from our decision makers, we have: 

• begun to draft a vision for the area 
• an understanding of the development requirements for our area

Finally, we have started: 

• to identify where new developments could be located
• looking at what new planning policies and information or data we’d need for decision making about new developments 

We’ve shared some of this with the public through early engagement activities and published summaries on our website. 

We began a Strategic Environmental Assessment

We’re legally required to identify, describe and evaluate any likely significant effects on the environment of: 

• implementing the local plan 
• reasonable alternatives taking into account the objectives and the geographical scope of the plan 

This process will consider how community, national and international environmental protection objectives and any other environmental challenges are taken into account in the plan. It will help us to predict significant environmental effects and develop ways of preventing, reducing and offsetting these. 

It is important we start this work early and are transparent about how we’re doing the assessment when engaging stakeholders and communities.   

We’ve commissioned consultants to undertake the Strategic Environmental Assessment (SEA) who have identified other relevant plans and programmes and are in the process of collecting baseline information, looking at the area’s environment and relevant designations to identify potential issues or problems. 

We noted the significant strength of local support for maintaining and protecting these environmental assets areas through our engagement so far, notably the Upper Nene Valley Gravel Pits Special Protection Area. We have started working with specialists to identify what our assessment will need to cover and the main objectives for our assessment. 

We’re establishing the scope of our SEA and the level of detail we will need to include in our draft environmental report as well as considering how spatial options can be considered.

How to stay up to date

For updates about upcoming consultation activities and to be added to our consultation database please contact [email protected] 

Follow us on social media to see our progress in preparing the local plan. 

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