A TAMAR Valley parish says it became the first to create a “Neighbourhood Priority Statement” (NPS) as it wants its residents to have a voice.

St Mellion parish council is one of around a dozen in Cornwall to pilot NPS as an alternative to a Neighbourhood Plan. It’s a less detailed, simpler approach to setting out the key wishes of residents with regard to future development and services.

Neighbourhood Priority Statements were introduced nationally by the Levelling Up and Regeneration Act of 2023, and will be used to inform the content of Cornwall’s next Local Plan, due in 2030.

For St Mellion, said local council chairman Bridie Kent, it made sense. “We are a very small parish, with no publicly available land and no buildings owned by the council. We don’t have all the complexities of a larger parish.”

Trying to get all the components that have to go in to a Neighbourhood Plan to fit St Mellion didn’t really work all that well, she said. The Neighbourhood Priority Statement is short and to the point and Cllr Kent hopes it will engage people’s attention more.

St Mellion had already drafted a Neighbourhood Plan in 2023 from surveys carried out among its residents and Cornwall Council suggested that this be changed to an NPS.

Since the government announced new housing targets in December 2024, most towns and parishes in Cornwall have discovered that the housing policies of their Neighbourhood Plans will be obsolete. Cornwall has been told that it must build 4450 new homes each year as opposed to the 2700 previously. In this context, Cornwall Council says it is doing what it can to ensure that it remains able to set some parameters for this new housing, and this includes making sure that local places have a say in the 2030 Local Plan.

“The input of local residents will influence where new homes should be built and the infrastructure that their community needs,” says the Council, “and Cornwall Council has a statutory obligation to endorse and take published NPS statements into account.

“The more community input that we have, the more likely it is that the new Local Plan will deliver policy and strategy to help Cornwall to thrive. New homes will still be built in your parish if you don’t produce a NPS – but you will lose the opportunity to influence where they should go and what they will look like.”

In St Mellion, says Cllr Kent, there’s certainly worry over losing control over where development might go.

“We’re surrounded by very good farmland and we’d be reluctant to see that encroached upon. The fact is we don’t have the facilities either.

“I think we are as confident in the Neighbourhood Priority Statement as we can be in an ever-changing world.

“If we don’t do anything, then the parish won’t have a voice. If we do something, then it makes people’s feelings known. But it’s only as good as the legislation that’s available at the time.”