Statutory development plan

Background

A new land-use and transportation planning system has been introduced by the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 and related regulations and guidance. The statutory Development Plan as defined in the Act now consists of documents from both regional and local levels.

The Development Plan for the city up to the point the Act became operational in late 2004 was solely the Unitary Development Plan (UDP). It is now being replaced with a combination of the Local Development Framework (LDF) and Regional Spatial Strategy. Until such time as the LDF is adopted in full, then some parts of the UDP will remain in place.

Current statutory Development Plan

The elements of the statutory Development Plan will change over time as new plans become operational. Currently it consists of:

'Saved' UDP policies (from UDP published in January 1998)
Walker Riverside Area Action Plan Development Plan Document (adopted April 2007)
Regional Spatial Strategy (published July 2008)
The Proposals Map (from the UDP but as amended by Walker Riverside Area Action Plan DPD)

The following sections give more detail of each of these aspects of the Development Plan.

Saved UDP policies

Under the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004, all policies in existing development plans including our UDP were 'saved' until 27 September 2007. Beyond that date policies had to be further saved by direction of the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government under paragraph 1(3) of Schedule 8 to the Act. A Direction was issued on 31 August 2007, saving 128 policies and allowing 67 to expire.

Link to Saved UDP policies page

Although the UDP as a whole (as adopted in early 1998) is strictly speaking no longer operational, we still consider it relevant to planning decision making. If you would like to look at it you can either download a pdf file (of the text only) or go to the Planning Portal for an html version linked to the Proposals Map. Please note that neither of these versions take into account changes made by the Walker Riverside Area Action Plan DPD - see the separate inset map for this.

Unitary Development Plan (UDP) (PDF, 630 KB)
Link to UDP text and Proposals Map on Planning Portal

Walker Riverside Area Action Plan DPD

This DPD was adopted in April 2007. It has made some minor amendments to way UDP policies apply and has made major changes to the Proposals Map. There is a separate page on the Area Action Plan.

Link to Walker Riverside Area Action Plan page

Regional Spatial Strategy

The current Regional Spatial Strategy (RSS) for the North East was published on 15 July 2008, superseding previous RSS (originally published as Regional Planning Guidance for the North East [RPG1] in 2002). It is available to download on the Government Office for the North East (GONE) site:

Regional planning page on GONE site
Regional Spatial Strategy - document (PDF, 1.8 MB)
Regional Spatial Strategy - high resolution maps (PDF, 1.3 MB)

Proposals Map

The Proposals Map adopted as part of the UDP in 1998 still stands, except that it has been superseded in part by the Proposals Map for the Walker Riverside Area Action Plan (see link above). You can see the UDP Proposals Map map (and text) via the Planning Portal or by downloading the following jpeg images - please note very large files.

UDP Proposals Map (JPG, 13.2 MB - very large file)
UDP Proposals Map (key) (JPG, 906 KB)
UDP Proposals Map City centre inset (JPG, 3.9 MB - large file)
UDP Proposals Map City centre inset (key) (JPG, 453 KB)

You can also download here a high and low resolution versions of the Proposals Map for the Walker Riverside Area Action Plan (WRAAP), which supersedes the UDP Proposals Map for that area.

High resolution map for the WRAAP AAP DPD (PDF, 2.2 MB - large file)
Low resolution map for the WRAAP AAP DPD (JPG, 212 KB)