Local Development Plan (LDP) The Local Development Plan Team formally Submitted the Derry City & Strabane District Local Development Plan (LDP 2032) – draft Plan Strategy and supporting documents to the Department for Infrastructure (DfI) on 26th May 2022 as part of the Independent Examination (IE) process. All LDP Submission documents can be viewed here. They are also available for inspection during normal office opening hours, by appointment only, at the Council's two main offices in Derry and Strabane.
Following the Submission of the LDP draft Plan Strategy in May, the Department considered it, to check it is procedurally ‘sound’, that there are no obvious gaps in the evidence base and it is not fundamentally flawed in relation to its regional context. The Council received a formal letter from DfI Planning on 20th September 2022, stating that the Submission had successfully passed its initial checks, so it would be writing to the Planning Appeals Commission (PAC) to ‘cause an Independent Examination’.
The Council has since made the Submission documents available to the PAC, who have appointed a Programme Officer – who has undertaken their initial assessment of the LDP dPS and other Submission documents. The PAC wrote to the Council on 23rd December 2022 to advise that it had completed its initial document assessment so it was appointing a Senior Commissioner to undertake the Independent Examination (IE) of our LDP dPS. This will be the next step towards adoption of the LDP Plan Strategy. At the end of April 2023, the PAC wrote to the Council, advising that the Commissioner will begin the LDP Independent Examination’s public hearing sessions at 10.30am on 5th September 2023 for an initial two-week period (of approx. 6 weeks in total), with sessions being conducted remotely. Further details on the LDP IE will be found at https://www.pacni.gov.uk/dcs-examination-library