The Statement of Community Involvement (SCI) is a document that Buckinghamshire Council must produce and keep up to date to ensure effective community involvement at all stages in the planning process.
It sets out how anyone who lives, works, plays or carries out business in the Buckinghamshire Council area can be involved in plan making (local plans), Supplementary Planning Documents, neighbourhood plans, planning applications, and planning enforcement. The main aim of the SCI is to make consultation and involvement in planning more transparent, accessible, collaborative, inclusive and consistent.
The Public Consultation on the SCI will run from the 16th February to 22 March 2021.
Buckinghamshire Council will then review all of the comments received and then take this to Cabinet for formal adoption. This is expected to be around June 2021.
Warren Whyte, Cabinet Member for Planning and Enforcement said: “We recognise that planning affects people’s daily lives, as the decisions we make shape the place we live and work in. As a result, we want to involve communities as early in the process as possible.
There are many benefits for involving communities in planning matters, these include a greater focus on local needs and priorities; planning decisions informed by local knowledge; increased community understanding of how planning policies are developed.
We want our residents and business community, to feel empowered to get involved with planning if they wish. We aim to make consultation and involvement in planning transparent, accessible, collaborative, inclusive and consistent. We will do this through the methods set out in this SCI.”
The DRAFT SCI can be found on this link https://yourvoicebucks.citizenspace.com/planning/sci-2021/
