HOLMES Chapel's neighbourhood plan has reached the next stage.

After the successful public meetings in January when more than 140 residents attended, more than 70 people have offered to help develop the Neighbourhood Plan for the village.

The volunteers offered a range of services from delivering leaflets and consulting residents to IT skills, professional planning knowledge and business experience.

Preliminary meetings have been held to explain the process with the aim that the volunteers as representatives of the community will work to develop the policies which will guide and control village development in the future.

The volunteers have now been allocated across five policy areas and asked to consider what they feel the village should try to influence with regard to the village development over the next 15 years.

These policy areas are: housing, community and wellbeing, traffic and transport, employment and skills, countryside and environment.

The groups will consider issues raised in a previous questionnaire and other information which they gather with the aim of presenting outline proposals to the community. It is hoped that this information will be presented to the village in early summer this year.

Such proposals if supported by the community and supported by evidence will form policies to be incorporated into the Neighbourhood Plan.

The formal Neighbourhood Plan document, which will have to be submitted for independent examination, is expected to be ready by late autumn this year. Once independently approved it will be subject to a village referendum in the spring of 2016.

Cllr Brian Bath, who leads the steering group of the Neighbourhood Plan, said: “We are very pleased with the positive response from the community and the speedy way we have got the process underway.

"The sooner we have our Neighbourhood Plan in place the sooner the community will feel it has some control over the future development of the village."

The steering group is still seeking further help and for those who would like to be involved, information is available on the parish council web site at holmeschapelparishcouncil.org.uk