Campaigners ask when the Green Belt review and site-selection evidence will be published. The plan's evidence page holds nothing newer than November 2025.
Campaigners against building on Cheltenham’s Green Belt have written to the councils a second time, and this letter asks for dates. It puts nine questions to the Strategic and Local Plan team about when the evidence behind the plan will be published, and how long councillors and residents will have to read it before they are asked to approve site allocations.
The letter was sent on Thursday 24 September by the committee members of the Hyde Lane and Swindon Lane Action Group, which also campaigns as Save Cheltenham Greenbelt, to the plan team’s shared inbox and copied to the Journal. It follows the open letter the group issued on 14 September.
The timing matters because of what the councils’ own timetable says happens next. The published programme for the plan puts “council approvals for the Pre-Submission SLP (Regulation 19)” in October 2026, consultation from the end of October or early November to December, and submission to the Secretary of State in December.
Cheltenham has two meetings in October at which that approval could be taken. Cabinet meets at 6pm on Tuesday 13 October and full Council at 2.30pm on Monday 19 October, both in the Council Chamber at the Municipal Offices. Neither agenda has been published. The council’s meetings system says of each one: “The agenda will be displayed in the week before the meeting.” Gloucester City Council’s Cabinet, which has to approve the same plan, meets on 14 October.
What the group is asking
The letter is careful to say it is not accusing anyone of anything. “Our purpose in writing is not to suggest that the authorities have failed to meet those requirements, but to seek clarity and reassurance that the evidence supporting potentially irreversible decisions will be complete, transparent and available sufficiently early for meaningful scrutiny.”
Its questions, in the group’s own words, are:
- “When will the updated Green Belt assessment/review relevant to the current SLP be published?”
- “When will the final site-selection evidence and methodology be available, including the evidence used to determine why individual sites have been selected or rejected?”
- “What housing need, housing supply and spatial-strategy evidence will be available before decisions are taken on proposed allocations?”
- “When will the Sustainability Appraisal and the assessment of reasonable alternatives be available?”
- “When will the latest transport/highways, infrastructure, drainage/flooding, ecology and other supporting technical evidence be published?”
- “What evidence will elected Members receive before they are asked to consider or approve the Regulation 19 version of the SLP?”
- “How far in advance of those Member decisions will the full supporting evidence be available to elected Members and the public for meaningful scrutiny?”
- “What is the current timetable for Member consideration, Regulation 19 publication and subsequent submission of the plan for independent examination?”
- “What process will be used to demonstrate that the proposed plan is justified by proportionate evidence, has considered reasonable alternatives, and is capable of meeting the relevant tests of soundness and legal compliance?”
The group also asks for “links to the published material” where documents already exist.
What is published today
The plan’s evidence and documents page carries several dozen studies. Checked on Thursday 24 September, not one of them is dated 2026. The newest are a set of topic papers published in November 2025.
On the four subjects the letter asks about, this is what the page holds:
- Green Belt. One entry, under the heading “Existing Evidence”: the Joint Core Strategy Green Belt Assessment of September 2011, which is 15 years old this month. No updated review is listed.
- Sustainability Appraisal. A scoping report from October 2020 and a Sustainability Appraisal from December 2023, prepared alongside the Regulation 18 consultation document of the same month. Nothing appraising the plan now being written.
- Housing need. The Gloucestershire Local Housing Needs Assessment, dated 2020, and a Gloucestershire Economic Needs Assessment from August 2020.
- Site selection. A draft methodology for the Housing and Economic Land Availability Assessment published in November 2025, sitting above draft site assessments and RAG ratings from December 2023. The page notes that inclusion in the assessment “has no planning weight” and does not determine whether a site is allocated.
The landscape evidence is older still: a Joint Core Strategy characterisation assessment from September 2013, 13 years ago.
The page carries its own warning at the top: “This is an emerging evidence base. This page will be updated as more evidence is produced.” Work not yet published is not the same as work not done, and the plan team may be holding studies that are finished but not yet released. What the group is asking is when.
The engagement that was supposed to run until this month
The Regulation 18 stage, the one where alternatives are still open and comments shape the plan rather than test it, runs from February 2025 to September 2026 on the councils’ timetable. It ends this month.
The three councils take those comments through an engagement portal, where each topic paper or evidence study is opened for a six-week period. Every one of those windows has now closed. The most recent to accept comments were the Spatial Options, Settlement Hierarchy, Vision and Objectives topic papers and the land availability assessment, which were opened on 1 December 2025 and closed on 17 January 2026. Nothing has been opened for comment since, and no new paper has been added to the portal since 3 December 2025.
The plan’s own consultations page still describes that work under the heading “Live Engagement”, and still tells readers it “will run until June 2026”, a date that passed three months ago.
Why the group says the plan stage is the one that counts
The action group formed over roughly 40 hectares of Green Belt farmland between Hyde Lane and Swindon Lane, on the northern edge of the town, where developers have set out proposals for around 750 homes. No planning application has been made. Its argument, set out in the first letter, is that the decision which really settles whether that land is built on is the moment it is allocated in a plan, not the moment an application is decided.
The group summed up its request in five lines when it issued that letter: “Establish the evidence. Test the alternatives. Agree the spatial strategy. Protect Green Belt wherever possible. Then make the irreversible decisions.”
This week’s letter closes in the same register. “Our objective is to ensure that decisions of this significance are evidence-led, transparent and capable of being clearly explained to the communities affected.”
What it means for you
- The formal chance to comment is the Regulation 19 consultation, expected from the end of October to December. That is the stage at which representations go to the government’s inspector, so it is the one that carries weight.
- If you want to see the plan before councillors vote, watch the agendas for Cabinet on 13 October and Council on 19 October on the council’s meetings calendar. Papers are published in the week before each meeting, and both are open to the public.
- You can sign up for notifications from the plan team, which is the only way to be told when new evidence appears.
- The plan team can be reached at info@strategiclocalplan.org or on 01684 295010.
We track applications, decisions and appeals across the borough on our Cheltenham planning news page.
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