Our last email was about what has been done to Handsworth Beck. Now we're covering the two things we promised: our meeting with the Council leaders on 9 September, and the further consultation on the Plan, which is now open.

The Town Hall meeting: the agreed notes

On Wednesday 9 September, nine members of the Sheffield Green Belt Alliance - from Chapeltown, Ecclesfield and Grenoside, Lodge Moor, S12 and S13 - met Councillor Fran Belbin, Leader of Sheffield City Council, and Councillor Angela Argenzio, Leader of the Green Group, at the Town Hall. The meeting followed up the 8 August site visits.

We are grateful to both leaders for agreeing to meet us, and for agreeing that a written record should be published.

The Alliance drafted the notes and the Council agreed the wording on Thursday 17 September. They cover the questions the leaders took away from the site visits, brownfield land, infrastructure, whether the Plan can be revisited, and how the Council works with communities. Councillor Belbin confirmed that planning officers had not yet answered all of the questions.

We repeated the argument we have made from the start, and it is now in a record the Council has agreed:

"the Inspectors were assessing whether the plan was sound, rather than identifying every possible improvement that might turn a 'C' plan into an 'A'. Passing the examination would therefore not, in itself, demonstrate that the Council had produced the best plan for the city."

On whether the Council can ask the Inspectors to revisit the Plan, Councillor Belbin said that was not her understanding of the process, but she would seek further advice. The notes record:

"Cllr Belbin also said that she was carefully considering what options might be available to her in terms of next steps and whether there was a political route through the current situation."

We also asked for a working group with senior planning officers, so that evidence can be discussed rather than exchanged through scripted questions at Full Council. Councillor Belbin said she was unsure what would be feasible, but agreed to consider it.

Read the jointly agreed notes (PDF, 6 pages), or the page about the meeting.

The consultation is open

The consultation on the Further Main Modifications opened on Monday 14 September and closes at 5pm on Wednesday 28 October.

In January the Inspectors told the Council the Plan could be found sound if a long list of changes were made. Those were the 479 Main Modifications, consulted on in the spring. Having read the responses, the Inspectors asked for a second, shorter round. These are the Further Main Modifications: 33 changes, four changes to the Policies Map, and eight new evidence documents published alongside them.

Neither SES29 nor SES30 has the wording of its allocation changed. But the changes do affect both sites.

• The Council has republished the SES29 boundary, because the site was mapped incorrectly during the spring consultation. Anyone who commented on SES29 then was shown the wrong map.

• Updated national data separates grade 3a farmland, which counts as best and most versatile, from grade 3b for the first time. On the Council's assessment, SES29 moves from "poorer quality" land to "higher quality", and SES30 from "neutral" to "higher quality".

• A new Council note confirms that the Cinder Hill Green Quaker burial ground sits on the eastern boundary of SES30 and is to be added to the local heritage list. The Council accepts that building on SES30 may affect its setting - and twice refers to SES29 when it means SES30.

This is a "narrow" consultation. The Council is asking for comments on whether the changes are sound and legally compliant, and not for a re-run of earlier arguments. What the Council's own new evidence says about our two sites is fair ground.

The agreed notes of our meeting record Councillor Belbin describing Sheffield as being in "the exceptional position of moving into a fifth consultation, which had not been anticipated". It closes more than three years after the Plan was sent for examination on 6 October 2023. The Planning Inspectorate's guidance says the examination of a full local plan tends to last around a year, and sometimes longer.

It also closes more than six and a half years after the Council's last call for sites. A call for sites is how the Council finds out what land is available to build on, and the Council can only release Green Belt if it can show there is not enough suitable land elsewhere in the city. The last call closed on 7 February 2020, six weeks before the first lockdown changed how land is used across the city. The Council has not asked for sites since.

We are working with planning professionals, and with our solicitors who specialise in environmental law, on the Sheffield Green Belt Alliance response.

We have written a page for the S13 campaign explaining what the consultation is, what is in it, and what it means for S13: What are the Further Main Modifications?

What's next

The consultation. We are reading the documents and will publish a guide on how to respond, with the modification numbers to quote and the points that matter for S13, well before the deadline.

Full Council. The next meeting of Full Council is on Wednesday 23 September at 2pm. We will again be asking questions and making statements.

Handsworth Beck. Thank you to everyone who has sent photographs of Handsworth Beck. Please keep them coming to this address - photographs with dates are the most useful.

-The Save S13 Green Belt Campaign