Coldean planning forum asks for five more years after residents back its plan

The volunteer group that wrote Coldean’s neighbourhood plan has asked Brighton & Hove City Council^2,3 to let it carry on for another five years. The council will ask people who live or work in Coldean what they think in an online survey that opens on Tuesday 17 November.

The Coldean Neighbourhood Planning Forum^4,5 was approved on 25 November 2021, and under planning law a forum’s designation ends after five years. Its plan has only just come into force. Residents voted for it in a referendum on 24 September, 374 to 43, and the council formally made it the next day. It now sits alongside the City Plan when planners decide applications in the area.

The plan was put together by a committee of forum members and volunteers, with help from planning and architecture consultants and grants from Locality, the national body that funds neighbourhood forums. It names eight Local Green Spaces, among them The Park, Coldean Woods Open Space and The Roundway, which the plan says should be protected in line with national policy for Green Belts. It also protects the area’s allotments, sets conditions on turning houses into shared homes, and has policies on cycle and walkways, views to the South Downs and nature recovery.

“A lot of hard work has been put into this Plan,” wrote Patrick Lowe, the forum’s chairman, in its foreword.

The forum has said it will review the plan once the new Brighton & Hove City Plan and the South Downs Local Plan reviews are finished. To be designated, a forum needs at least 21 members who live or work in the area or are councillors there.

One catch: turnout in the referendum was 18.89%, so the plan was approved by a small share of Coldean’s voters. The survey on the forum’s future runs until 11.59pm on Sunday 3 January 2027.