Happy New Year and welcome to the latest edition of our Creating a Place for Life blog.
I am looking forward to what I hope will be a better year for us all, albeit acknowledging that we still have many challenges ahead of us.
I welcomed the first week back after the Christmas break by meeting, once again, with my member colleagues and officers from Essex, Colchester and Tendring as part of the Tendring/Colchester Borders Garden Community Member Group. We welcomed Cllr Nick Turner to the group, who joins me in representing Tendring, and has replaced Cllr Alan Coley.
Following the publication of our Engagement and Consultation Strategy in December 2020, we discussed activity to help promote the launch of the Digital Engagement Portal. It is very important to all of us that a diverse audience is reached and actively participates. We agreed with officers to monitor this throughout the engagement process as we work towards producing the Development Plan Document.
We are very aware that at this present time we cannot engage with our communities in the usual way, therefore it is very important for us to maximise all digital channels available to us, until life returns to some kind of normality.
We also agreed to consider, on behalf of our respective authorities, our ongoing priorities for this project. This will help us shape how the project will be governed and delivered in the future. This is a very important and detailed conversation, which is ongoing. In these meetings we spend time discussing, agreeing and steering matters, in advance of any required political decisions being made individually by our respective authorities.
2021 is going to be a significant year for this project, as we will see Essex County Council submit the planning application for the A120/A133 Link Road. The application is due to be submitted in the early part of this year and determined later in the year.
Alongside the Link Road, the £99.9million received from Government, as part of the Housing Infrastructure Fund (HIF), will also enable a new Rapid Transit System (RTS) to be developed. These two pieces of infrastructure will work together, with the Link Road creating a new link between the A133 and A120 taking traffic away from local roads, and the Rapid Transit System linking key destinations across the area.
Infrastructure is a clear commitment when planning a Garden Community and the Link Road, and Rapid Transit System, is an incredibly significant development in demonstrating that our plans for the Tendring/Colchester Borders Garden Community are developed with an ‘infrastructure first’ approach.
May I wish you all a safe, healthy and happier 2021.
Cllr Carlo Guglielmi, Deputy Leader for Tendring District Council
Tendring Representative for the Tendring/Colchester Borders Garden Community Member Group