In June 2017 Warmington Parish Council (WPC) applied to East Northants Council (ENC) for the Parish to become a Neighbourhood Area under the Localism Act 2011. This application was approved on 8 August 2017 allowing the WPC to begin to make a Neighbourhood Plan.
The final Warmington Neighbourhood Plan was approved by East Northants Council on 17 December 2019. This page has been edited to reflect that the process described has now finished and is for background purposes only.
A quick 2 minute video introduction to what a neighbourhood plan is can be found here
This allows the community to make decisions about what development takes place within the area by writing a Neighbourhood Plan which is a statutory legal document that forms part of ENC Planning Policy.
To facilitate the process of making the Warmington Neighbourhood Plan (WNP) the WPC formed a sub-committee called the Warmington Neighbourhood Plan Project Group (WNPPG). The function of this group was to steer the community through the plan process. It was important that the community and not the WPC had the biggest input to the plan and there were legal safeguards to ensure this happens in the form of mandatory surveys, consultations, inspections and a final referendum that had to approve the plan before it became a legal part of planning policy.
The WNPPG had 9 members, 4 from the PC and 5 co-opted volunteers from the village but it required people from the wider community to help with working groups to gather information and put the plan together. Professional consultants were also appointed to help with the process and to ensure that the WNP was legitimate within the wider planning policy framework. However, the final plan was largely written by the WNPPG volunteers alone.