Sarah Townsend
The council has asked landowners, land promoters and the public to propose non-greenfield sites for redevelopment, as it starts to draw up its own local plan after withdrawing from the Greater Manchester Spatial Framework last year.
Stockport Council decided to leave the GMSF – now called Places for Everyone – last December due to concerns over Green Belt release raised by local Conservatives and others. The other nine Greater Manchester boroughs are now pressing ahead with a revised strategy for allocating land for employment and housing across the city-region, without Stockport.
But the decision leaves Stockport under pressure to produce a separate local plan that delivers on the steep housing targets imposed on Greater Manchester boroughs under national planning policy. Mayor Andy Burnham claimed in a letter to Stockport’s Conservative MPs last year: “The GMSF allows the 10 Greater Manchester boroughs to share out the numbers of homes that each individual borough needs to build. As a result, the GMSF allows Stockport to cut the number of planned homes by over 5,000 – 25% less than its Government target.