New Town Centre for Colin Village

Outline planning application for a new town centre comprising of a mixture of commercial, health, leisure, community, residential and educational uses as well as a Hub building for the Belfast Rapid Transit System. In addition, a pedestrian/cycle ‘green’ bridge, road infrastructure improvements, formal play area, a town square, recreational sports pitches and pavilion are proposed on the 14.5 hectare site.

In collaboration with the Paul Hogarth Company, we undertook significant community consultation, stakeholder engagement, and formal Pre-Application Discussions (PAD) with the statutory authorities, which fed into the overall master plan. Our office was also responsible for the management of the multi-disciplinary EIA team and led in the compilation of the Environmental Statement that accompanies the outline planning application.

Issues Encountered

• Management of feedback from a wide group of stakeholders and statutory bodies. Minutes of meetings were prepared and a matrix produced to monitor the range of viewpoints and feed their opinions into the design of the master plan.
• Following the transfer of planning powers in April 2015, the Council boundaries changed resulting in the subject site shifting from the Lisburn City Council to the Belfast City Council. As a consequence, the planning application was re-allocated to the Belfast planning authority leading to a delay in the processing of the outline planning application. A presentation was held with the new planning officers to bring them up to speed with the development proposal in a timely fashion.
• Table produced to monitor the responses from the statutory bodies.

Our Involvement

We were project leader of the EIA multi-disciplinary team involved in the preparation of the Environmental Statement and was also responsible for the preparation, submission and monitoring of the outline planning application.