Council-wide Plans
Neighbourhood Plan
Presenting the council's Neighbourhood Plan status and documents.

Neighbourhood Plan
A Neighbourhood Plan is a plan drawn up by a community. It sets out a shared vision and policies to shape future development of the area covered by the Plan. The first version of the Astbury + Moreton Neighbourhood Plan was adopted in 2017 with the intention that it would be valid as part of the planning process until 2030.
Following changes to the National Planning Policy Framework and the continuing development of Cheshire East’s Local Plan, the Neighbourhood Plan has been reviewed and updated. The updated Neighbourhood Plan was approved by Cheshire East Council on 17 January 2025.
Astbury + Moreton Neighbourhood Plan Policies
Astbury + Moreton Design Guidelines & Design Codes
A Neighbourhood Plan helps to identify projects that are most important to the community and to make sure that development takes place in a way and at a pace that suits the residents of the plan area.
Neighbourhood Plans cannot say ‘no’ to development.
Since our original Neighbourhood Plan came into force in 2017 there have been several important changes to national and local government planning legislation. Because of these changes, our Plan needed to be updated and the Parish Council formed a Neighbourhood Plan Working Group of local residents to make sure our Plan is as strong as it can be for the future.
Read how the Working Group developed and gained approval for the updated Plan.
How we updated the Plan
The modified plan comprises two documents:
- The Plan’s policies
- A set of design codes and guidelines commissioned from AECOM that supports many of the Plan’s policie
The Localism Act 2011 gave communities the the power to develop Neighbourhood Development Plans (usually known as Neighbourhood Plans), and the processes by which a community develop or modify a Plan is laid out in The Neighbourhood Planning (General) Regulations 2012): in the rest of this page, these are referred to as simply as “the Regulations”.
At an open meeting in early 2022, we engaged with you, our community to identify areas of concern, and using the results of this engagement we dew up a draft revised Vision and Aims for the Plan.
We asked you to complete our questionnaire to check and refine the Vision and Aims.
We collated and analyzed your completed surveys. Most respondents agreed with the stated Vision and Aims, but several suggested an improvement to one Aim, which we adopted.
Meanwhile, you can read what your fellow residents thought in the collated consultation results.
We analyzed the results and used them to:
- Update the Plan’s evidence base to reflect most recent data
- Update references to most recent national and Cheshire East policy
- Review and revise the Plan policies, including their supporting rationale and evidence
We then asked you (and other consultees, as required by Regulation 14 and the related Schedule 1 of the Regulations) to give us your views on the draft Plan — a process known as pre-submission consultation, see above. The modified plan comprises two documents:
- The Plan’s policies
- A set of design codes and guidelines commissioned from AECOM that supports many of the Plan’s policies
We analyzed your feedback from the pre-submission consultation and made the necessary changes to the Plan.
Getting the Plan adopted
Now we had a draft Plan that we were all satisfied with, we have embarked on the formal process in order that it is adopted and becomes part of planning law for our two parishes.
The first step was to submit the revised Plan, along with other required documents, to Cheshire East Council, our planning authority, which we have now done. This step is described in Regulation 15, which specifies the necessary documents. You can download all the submitted documents in this ZIP archive.
As we expected, Cheshire East decided that the changes are not so minor (i.e. that they would not materially affect policies made by the Cheshire East) that they cannot adopt the revised Plan immediately.
Instead, it opened a post-submission consultation (Regulation 16) to which it invited members of the public and a list of bodies including nearby local councils, utility companies and other organizations to comment on the revised Plan.
This consultation closed on 2 October 2024: you can read all the submissions made by visiting the Cheshire East consultation page.
Cheshire East then chose an independent examiner and submitted all the documents we supplied under Regulation 15 together with all the Regulation 16 consultation responses to the examiner — (Regulation 17). Cheshire East has acknowledged this submission in this notice.
The independent examiner produced a report giving his judgement on whether the revised plan meets all the basic conditions required for a revised Plan, and made recommendations for further revision. They then gave us and all parties that made submissions to the Regulation 14 and 16 consultations an opportunity to comment on them within 6 weeks. Cheshire East decided what action they would take for each of the examiner’s recommendations— (Regulation 17A).
Cheshire East’s decided that all of the examiner’s recommendations should be accepted, and we duly updated the Plan in line with those recommendations. Cheshire East further decided that our overall revisions are not so significant or substantial as to change the nature of the Plan as originally made and therefore the revised Plan need not be approved in a referendum of both parishes. They then formally revoked the original Plan and ‘made’ (i.e. adopted) the revised Plan on 17 January 2025.