Dear Editor,
Stroud District Council is asking residents what they want the district to look like over the next fifteen to twenty years. The consultation on the new Local Plan is open until 9 August and it is genuinely worth taking part.
This is not a tick-box exercise. The Local Plan shapes everything – where homes get built, what they look like, what kind of place this becomes.
So what do we want? It could be simple things all the way through to more ambitious, specific policies.
More trees – lots more, planted everywhere, not just as afterthoughts on the edges of new estates. More wild spaces and green corridors so nature can move through the landscape. Hedgehog highways between gardens. Swift boxes and bat boxes built into new buildings as standard. All new developments required to include plentiful green space and tree planting, with proper aftercare. Homes built for the climate we actually live in, so good at staying warm in winter and cool in summer, with solar panels, heat pumps and water recycling as standard, not optional extras that developers can choose to ignore. Public amenities that are properly resourced and well cared for e.g. the lido, green spaces, local hospitals, community halls, great walking and biking trails, a climbing centre. Better and well-maintained cycle routes and walking paths, good public transport, places designed around people and nature rather than cars. Housing that local people on ordinary incomes can actually afford, so genuinely affordable, not affordable in name only. Community housing and co-housing as normal options, not rare exceptions. Rural communities where young people can stay, where there are small businesses, growers, craftspeople and artists living and working alongside everyone else. A district where nature is genuinely flourishing, not just protected on paper.
Then there are more specific policy asks too – things that don’t currently exist but could. One I would particularly like to see, and would encourage anyone who shares this interest to ask for by name, is a Low Impact Development (LID) policy.
Low Impact Development is exactly what it sounds like: development that, by virtue of its low or benign environmental impact, can be permitted in locations where conventional development would not normally be allowed. Yurts, tiny homes, roundhouses, ecological smallholdings, creative live/ work spaces embedded in nature. People living close to the land, growing food, managing habitats, generating their own energy, living lightly.
Low Impact Development is a carefully defined and specific form of development and importantly it is not a backdoor route to conventional housing. If a LID ceases to function as one, the planning permission ceases and the land cannot become anything else. That protection is built in to the policy.
There are people in this district already doing this, and many more who want to live a sustainable life that directly supports ecological regeneration, but currently there is no planning framework to support them.
Wales introduced a policy called One Planet Development fifteen years ago and it has worked: households consistently meet their ecological targets, improve biodiversity and contribute positively to their communities. Cornwall adopted its own LID policy in 2023. Stroud’s immediate neighbour, the Forest of Dean, included the most practical English LID policy yet assembled in its 2024 Draft Local Plan — eight clear, accessible criteria covering land-based activity, zero-carbon construction
and biodiversity improvement. It didn’t survive into the next draft, but it showed what is possible and what Stroud could build on. Stroud could be next, but only if people ask for it. If you take the survey, use the words Low Impact Development. Put them in the other boxes. Let the council know this matters.
Some people may feel that the planned move to a single Gloucestershire unitary council in 2028 makes this consultation less worth bothering with. The opposite is true. Any policies SDC develops now, and any clear public mandate behind them, will carry forward into the new council. What gets said now matters.
The survey is at stroud.gov.uk/localplan. It takes about 30 minutes. Tell them what kind of district you want to live in. Thank you.
Name and address supplied
