Policy GESP40: Garden Communities

The Greater Exeter councils will pursue the delivery of high quality development applying garden city principles to residential and mixed use GESP allocations:

1. Residential and mixed use allocations will be delivered in accordance with garden city principles to:
   1. Create distinctive, local identities through strong visions
   2. Ensure well designed, vibrant, mixed uses places including a range of local facilities
   3. Support healthy lifestyles and provide local healthcare for everyday needs
   4. Provide a variety of high quality and flexible affordable and market homes
   5. Deliver appropriately phased and designed infrastructure which plays a positive role in place-making and building communities
   6. Support a wide range of accessible, local jobs and provide the education and skills to support local employment
   7. Enhance the natural and historic environment and provide comprehensive green infrastructure, facilitating and encouraging recreational use within the site
   8. Ensure that all new residential, employment and commercial development will deliver net zero carbon emissions and is resilient to the effects of climate change
   9. Deliver high quality, integrated, multi-modal and low carbon transport options
   10. Ensure development is future proofed and resilient to change
2. The Greater Exeter councils will deliver a series of garden communities at:
   1. Culm Garden Village
   2. Exeter and East Devon Garden Communities
   3. Newton Abbot
3. The garden communities will follow the garden city principles and will also:
   1. Provide an appropriate scale of development for the communities to maximise self-sufficiency
   2. Foster community engagement in the planning process and local governance
   3. Ensure a legacy of community stewardship for the ownership and maintenance of assets and infrastructure
4. The garden communities will be delivered in an innovative way through:
   1. One or more locally-led development corporations
   2. Capturing a greater proportion of land value uplift
   3. Accessing finance and private sector investment
   4. The preparation of a detailed delivery strategy provided by the site promoter

10.12 Section C of this consultation seeks your views on GESP site options which could be taken forward as allocations as the plan progresses. These allocations will be supplemented with further proposals allocated in local plans. Although the allocations will vary in scale, all should be delivered at a high quality applying the garden city principles set out in draft policy GESP40. Pursuing the garden city principles will ensure that the resulting development creates high quality places and strong communities which are net-zero carbon.

10.13 Some of the potential GESP site options are particularly large, and could be mixed use. The scale of these large scale garden community site options means that there are opportunities to deliver them comprehensively and in an innovative way, using government support where available and ensuring the ongoing involvement of the community in their delivery and operation. The suggested approach for local governance, engagement and stewardship will mean that residents and the wider community actively take responsibility for their local area and how it is run. The delivery of garden communities would require an innovative delivery model. This would include at least one development corporation where local authority and wider public sector representation would oversee the provision of the garden communities, capturing more of the value from land sales than generally takes place. This value, together with additional external finance, could then be invested in the quality of building, infrastructure and facilities. Delivery strategies will be required for the garden communities to consider land acquisition and disposal, the securing of funding for infrastructure delivery and arrangements for community stewardship.

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