Supplementary planning documents (SPDs) are produced by the city council to give more detail about how particular Local Plan policies should be interpreted or applied in practice and provide further information to guide the council’s planning decisions on planning applications. SPD is 'supplementary' to adopted planning policy and must be consistent with it – it cannot create new policies.
The government has made clear that SPDs can only be used as a means of speeding up the delivery of sustainable development and it should not impose additional unreasonable cost burdens on developers.
Before an SPD is formally adopted and used in decision making, the city council must consult the public on a draft version of the document for a minimum of four weeks and must take account of any comments received.
The adopted SPDs listed support policies in the Norwich Development Management Policies Local Plan and Norwich Site Allocations Local Plan, both adopted in December 2014. They supersede any SPD in use before that date. Each document is accompanied by:
- Adoption statement (which states how the statutory procedures have been met)
- Consultation statement (called the “Regulation 12(a) statement”) which sets out responses received during consultation and how these were dealt with)
