This week, my postbox brought some very good news for those of us who passionately believe in localism. I received a letter saying that Eric Pickles, the Secretary of State for Communities and Local Government, has refused to overturn Wiltshire Council’s decision not to grant planning permission for 350 homes at Coate Bridge in Devizes. The proposed development did not conform to the detailed development work in the Devizes area neighbourhood plan. Led by Laura Mayes, Wiltshire councillor for Roundway, many people in the town and at Wiltshire Council have worked for months on both the Wiltshire Core strategy and the more detailed neighbourhood plans. Much work had been done to identify the required land supply and appropriate building sites for badly needed housing in Wiltshire. The issue at stake here was a development proposal that delivered houses on a site not in the local plan, as opposed to building on many more suitable sites.

Wiltshire Council had turned down the original application but an appeal was made and I took the decision to ask the Secretary of State to take over the decision-making, a process called ‘recovering’ the appeal, and after many meetings, a final decision was made. I try to stay neutral on planning matters as I usually have constituents on both sides of the issue, but in this case, a matter of national policy was at stake, namely how much weight should a local or neighbourhood plan carry? Neighbourhood planning is a new process, brought in by the Localism Act in 2011 to allow communities much more say over local development and since then much work has gone on to turn the guidelines into the reality of a neighbourhood plan.

However, many plans are not quite in their final, approved version and the question at stake here was whether the Devizes plan carried enough weight, despite being in advanced draft form, to allow the appeal to be refused. The Secretary of State decided the answer was yes – a triumph for localism. We still need to build houses but these should be built where local people want them and that is exactly what the local plan is designed to do. I do urge every community to develop their local plans, and everyone to get involved. We finally have the ability to shape the way our communities grow; it’s official and Eric Pickles agrees!