MARDEN COMMUNITY PLAN

Welcome to the Marden Community Plan section of the Marden village website.  This page along with further information will be developed over the next few weeks as the Marden Community Plan develops.

So, what's this all about?

Community actions plans are a means for local communities to audit their facilities, services and needs and develop an action plan (over a period of up to 5 years) to improve them. The Government’s Guidance to Local Authorities, ‘Preparing Community Strategies’ (2000) makes clear links between community strategies, local development plans and plans prepared at a parish or neighbourhood level.

 Background

The concept of parish level community action planning was introduced to Kent 30 years ago in response to the loss of facilities and services in rural areas. Up until recently these were called Village Appraisals. Most parishes  carried out one; though not so Marden. These were renamed Parish Plans following the Rural White Paper (2000). Lead by the Marden Society, we, instead, completed a Village Design Statement 

Village Design Statements (VDS)

Marden completed it's Village Design Statement at the Millennium.  A parallel development with greater emphasis on influencing land use planning at parish level. These enable communities to draw up design guidelines to manage new development. New planning regulations introduced this year mean that VDS can no longer be adopted as supplementary planning guidance by the planning authority, but may still be taken as material consideration in planning decisions. Lobbying and research is being carried out currently to restore the role of VDS.

Market Town Healthchecks

In April 2004 the South East Development Agency (SEEDA) launched a 7 year Market Towns Programme to regenerate larger villages/market towns and their rural hinterlands. The shortlist includes Marden, Staplehurst, Lenham and Headcorn. To qualify for funding of up to £40k, or exceptionally £240k, towns have to undertake a Market Town Healthcheck. Key to this is the establishment of a town partnership involving the parish/town council (and neighbouring councils if included in hinterland), local businesses, voluntary and community organisations. Guidance is available from www.countryside.gov.uk/market-towns. Advice and support is available from the Kent Rural Towns Co-ordinator via www.ruralkent.org.uk. Lenham’s £1m Community Project was part funded by an earlier version of this programme. Staplehurst and Paddock Wood, like Marden have just launched their Healthchecks.

 What Next

We have set up Management and Working Groups and are drawing up a project plan, constitution and budget plan, all of which are necessary to be able to apply for funding.  Meetings will be held monthly in the Memorial Hall to discuss what has been achieved and what still needs to be done.  All meetings will be advertised on the front page of the main website.

We hope to have produced and published the Action Plan for Marden to the Market Towns Healthchecks format (see above) by early in 2007.

There's a lot of work to do - please keep visiting this website to track our progress, or come along to the meetings.  Become involved, too, if you wish.

More information

Click here to look at what's been happening, copies of minutes, reports and the like, and to find out what other villages are doing.

Graham Tippen
Marden Community Plan
Project Co-ordinator