THURROCK Council's local development plan task force will meet next week - but there is nothing new on its agenda!

The absence of a local plan in the borough is seen as a major flaw and has caused problems at many meetings of the authority's planning committee and many councillors have called for work on the local plan to be a priority.

The council is running well behind its own timetable for the local plan which is supposed to be the blueprint for the amount of development for Thurrock and its distribution across the borough.

It will be a long-term planning policy framework that, by law, must be used when deciding all future planning applications.

The council started work on the new local plan in 2014 and held public consultations from December 2018 until March 2019.

However, there has been little obvious progress since despite more consultation programmes.

And only last month another consultation, looking for residents to identify 'The Beauty in my Back Yard' was announced.

However, that fails to rate a mention at the meeting of the task force next Monday when a rather mundane agenda contains no new reports, just a look back at the Thurrock Climate Change Scoping Study, published in April last year.

In July last year a local architect who has been working on projects for several developers bemoaned the lack of progress towards a definitive local plan. You can read out report here.