Work on Greater Manchester land plan reaches latest milestone

The Greater Manchester Spatial Framework will be an ambitious overarching document which will be used by planners in each local authority to guide development and growth, while co-ordinating it across the city region.

The next step in preparing the framework is to agree a set of objectives against which proposals can be assessed at each stage of the process.

These objectives will be used to evaluate the social, economic and environmental impacts - positive and negative - of the proposed framework through what is called an integrated assessment. This comprises a number of statutory plan and non-statutory assessments, including a Sustainability Appraisal / Strategic Environmental Assessment and an Equalities Impact Assessment.

The integrated assessment scoping report, including the assessment objectives, has been published and will be available for comments from today, Tuesday 28 July to Tuesday 1 September.

Councillor Sue Derbyshire, Greater Manchester Combined Authority lead on Planning and Housing, said: "The spatial framework will reflect our ambition for Greater Manchester to manage the challenge of growth across all 10 authorities in a coherent way.

"Our work has Greater Manchester people at its heart - we want to connect them to the opportunities created by growth, and that means sustainable and well-connected neighbourhoods. But it also means that we need to ensure that we gauge the impact of any proposals to make sure they are as positive as possible in supporting our goals for Greater Manchester."

Further information on the development of the spatial framework will be published later this year with a first draft of the Spatial Framework is due to be published in autumn 2016.