11.5.05

Dear Mr Wheeler

The judge has requested that more efforts be made to discussing what proposals could be worked out between us, rather than resort to consideration of demolition of one or more of our roundhouses and huts. He urged us to look to the future, rather than focussing on what has gone before. At the recent public enquiry, it was established that your authority is now committed to a new low impact policy, and we understand that the inspector into the JUDP will probably report with a detailed recommendation this October.

With this in mind, we would like to propose a process of discussion of our project as a low impact settlement. How we would see this is for preliminary discussions to take place, leading to an application for outline planning permission. At this point a site visit might be appropriate, at which we could explain to members our plans.

In brief, what we are looking at might be similar to the Tinker's Bubble agreement, or the permission for the Steward Wood development in the Dartmoor national park. In those cases, the area in which low impact residences could be built is marked in red, and the overall area covered by the management plan is defined in blue. Clear agreements would be made on maximum number of structures, their size and height, waste recycling, renewable energy, transport sharing etc. As we are not aiming to be a money-making project, we would not consider a business plan to be appropriate, but would be happy to tie occupation of structures to land-based activity and lifestyle, and could also point to the contribution such a project would make to the educational,social, economic and environmental well-being of the region.

We might be talking about a maximum of ten huts, plus barn, workshops and maybe two greenhouses or polytunnels - all low impact.
Yours sincerely,