Uttlesford council is now in its twelfth year preparing a new Local Plan. It was bad enough when the last attempt was withdrawn at the start of year 10. It’s now looking like year 13 or 14 at best before a plan is agreed and finished.

The Policy Planning Working Group meets tonight. The agenda is on the council’s website.

We are likely to have an issue over discussions in public. The Liberal Democrats have insisted for years that decisions behind closed doors undermine public trust. However, there do need to be some discussions in private for councillors to be able to probe and understand the masses of evidence that grows in complexity and volume by the day. That can’t be done in a large and public meeting, not least because it would be boring in the extreme to onlookers.

However, there is a school of thought at UDC that says “better to discuss in private whether to have private meetings of this type”. I think that is the best way to stir up more public suspicion on top of what exists.

Tonight should also be the time to talk openly about the need to carry out a stage of public consultation called Preferred Options that was deleted from the 2016 programme of work.

POST SCRIPT: Tuesday’s meeting sensibly did discuss in public session whether to hold some discussions with planning officers in private. The idea as I see it is to oversee the Local Plan project progress; elected member oversight of whether headway is being made at the right pace and that the work is thorough enough. It will NOT be about making decisions on details in the eventual Local Plan without public scrutiny. On that basis, I agreed to meet roughly weekly with the other political group leaders, John Lodge and Howard Rolfe, plus Susan Barker, the environment portfolio holder, to try out this approach.

We also discussed on Tuesday the fact that the Preferred Options stage of consultation had been skipped last year. There seemed to be general recognition that the public should not be bypassed in this year’s rerun.

I will upload another post this weekend about next Tuesday’s meeting of the Scrutiny Committee, where we will be examining a new report from the Planning Advisory Service on what went wrong in 2016 and what needs to be done in 2017 and 2018 to produce a reliable Local Plan without further false starts.