What is a Local Plan Examination in Public?

Some of our most important work happens 'behind the scenes'. This blog shines a light on the Conservation Team’s engagement with the strategic planning process, explaining why Local Plans are so important for wildlife and what goes on during a Local Plan Examination. We caught up with Conservation Officer, Jess Price, to find out more about the Chichester Local Plan.

What is a Local Plan?

A Local Plan sets out where and how development happens, and should include strong policies to protect, restore and enhance wildlife. Getting the Local Plan right can deliver win-wins for people, wildlife and climate. All Local Planning Authorities (LPAs) must have a Local Plan and they are often (but not always) prepared for a particular district – in this case, the Chichester Local Plan.

What’s an Examination in Public?

Creating a Local Plan is a lengthy process with various stages, often running over several years. The Examination in Public is the final hurdle, where a Planning Inspector carries out an independent examination of the Plan documents and all the supporting evidence to decide whether the Local Plan is ‘sound’. The examination process usually includes hearing sessions, which are held in public, after which the Inspector will send a report to the LPA recommending whether or not they can adopt the plan.

What’s the purpose?

The examination is to assess whether the Local Plan has been prepared according to strict legal and procedural requirements, and that it is consistent with national planning policy. The Inspector won’t make improvements to a Plan that is sound and legally compliant, or to make it ‘more sound’, which can be frustrating for participants!

What are the possible outcomes of an examination?

The plan might be found to be:

1) sound and legally compliant (you could think of this as an examination pass)

2) not sound and/or legally compliant, but could be made so by changes known as main modifications (i.e. needs improvement)

3) not sound/legally compliant and could not be made so by changes (i.e. a fail). In this case the plan would be withdrawn and the LPA would need to try again with an amended/new plan.

Who takes part?

The examination is primarily between the Inspector and the LPA which is trying to get its Local Plan ‘made’. However, representors who have concerns about the plan can take part in the hearings and voice their objections to the Inspector. 

The difficulty is that you can only take part in the examination if you responded to the previous official consultation of the Local Plan, known as the Regulation 19 consultation, which has usually happened months before. 

You can also only take part if you want to make a change to the plan. Inspectors don’t want to hear from people supporting the plan. In reality this means that most of the people at the examination hearings are local authority officers from the planning policy teams, developers and a few interested local people or action groups.

What preparation does the Conservation team need to do to prepare for one?

That depends on how many problems we have with the plan and how involved we have been in the plan making process to date. 

Taking the Chichester Local Plan as an example, our first involvement was responding to an ‘Issues & Options’ consultation back in 2017! 

Although Sussex Wildlife Trust supports a plan-led system and wants to see all our Local Authorities with up-to-date adopted Local Plans, there were parts of the Chichester Local Plan that we objected to and wanted to see changed. We set these out in our response to the Regulation 19 consultation, but then you just have to wait until the council submits the Plan and the Examination starts. Eventually.

We were first alerted to the Chichester Examination starting in June 2024, then in August we were sent the dates of the hearings and a link to the Inspector’s guidance notes and their Matters, Issues & Questions document. These are both important, because they set out the deadlines we needed to meet and listed the topics the Inspectors wanted to talk about. 

From the date of that email, we had three weeks to let the Inspectors know if we wanted to attend the hearing and what topics we wanted to speak on, and then a further two weeks to write and submit a hearing statement setting out our arguments and reasons for wanting the plan changed. 

This can be quite an intense period of work, because you have to remind yourself of what you said in your original response over a year ago and then go through all the evidence documents submitted to by the council to make sure your arguments are well evidenced and meet the tests of soundness. And you have to meet those deadlines, Inspectors will not accept late submissions.

So overall, the most important thing is to keep track of all the Local Plan processes happening in Sussex. We are very fortunate to have an excellent volunteer, a retired local authority planning officer, who regularly checks all the local authority websites and keeps track of when we expect consultations to happen. Then we can try to plan them in, so we don’t accidentally miss any.

How many do the Trust take part in a year, on average?

There are 17 Local Planning Authorities in Sussex, and they all have a duty to make a Local Plan - but since their Local Plans have to be reviewed every five years, and they have all been adopted at different times, they are all at different stages. 2024 has been a busy year for examinations, so far we have attended the Crawley and Chichester Local Plan examinations, sent written representations to the Mid Sussex Local Plan examination (which is due to continue in 2025) and then the Horsham Local Plan examination started in December (though it's now on hold). Along with this there is currently an initial consultation on the Brighton & Hove City Plan review, i.e. the very start of the Local Plan review process for this plan, and we believe that there will be Regulation 19 consultations for Wealden and Hastings in early 2025. 

However, it’s not always like this. Local Plans need to be reviewed every five years, so you can get some periods when everyone has an up-to-date plan and there are no examinations underway.

What’s the hardest part about it?

I actually enjoy the examination, it’s a great place to set out all your hard work and evidence in front of the Inspector. However, it has its frustrations, mostly due to the restrictive nature of the process, you are very limited on what you can comment on and what the Inspector can actually do to make changes. It’s also pretty formal which can make it off-putting for local people to get involved in. This is such a shame, as the local community often has such valuable input. It’s also very disheartening when you work for years to try to protect a Local Wildlife Site, for example, from being allocated for development and then you don’t succeed. But of course sometimes you do, and that makes it worth it.

How long after do you know if all that work has an impact on the result?

The final Inspector's report saying whether the plan should be adopted usually takes about six months to be published. However, this is because there is usually an interim letter from the Inspector setting out what changes they think are needed to make the plan sound. These changes are called ‘Main Modifications’ (it is very unusual for a plan to get through with absolutely no changes). The LPA then has to finalise the main modifications and put them out for public consultation, usually for at least six weeks. 

This is an opportunity for anyone to comment on the changes, regardless of whether they took part in the hearings or responded to the Regulation 19 consultation. The Inspectors will then consider all the representations and finalise their report on the Local Plan. So for example, the Crawley Local Plan hearings happened in January 2024 and the final plan was just adopted by the council in October 2024. So it can be a while!

This is one of the major issues with the plan making process that Governments want to address. A recent consultation from the Labour Government has said they want Local Plans to take 18 months or less to make, from that very first consultation to adoption. This is way faster then anything Sussex LPAs have managed to do to date, so it will be interesting to see how the Government think this can be achieved.