Who is the "Advisory Stakeholder Group"?

The plans in the draft Wilmslow Vision have been presented as being the output of the "Advisory Stakeholder Group".  Both the Council and Broadway Malyan, the private planning consultants used to help put the plans together, have sought to distance themselves from the proposals.  If we take that claim at face value for now, then the ASG has clearly wielded a huge amount of power in this process, including:


- setting the draft target number of new houses at 1,500 (rather than the minimum of 500 as requested by Cheshire East);
- setting the areas proposed for potential development; and
- setting the form of the questionnaire and consultation process.


Given that the non-elected ASG apparently wields such power to frame the whole debate, it seems only fair to understand:


- what is the composition of the ASG?
- who are the individuals who contributed to the process?
- what are those individuals' credentials for being selected?
- what was the process for ensuring that no conflicts of interest exist within the ASG, and can we see the output of this?
- how was the composition of the ASG selected by the Council in the first place?
- is all of the above in line with best practice?


Friends of Dean Row has deep concerns with regard to these questions.  For some reason, the Wilmslow Vision document choses not to explicitly set out the composition of the ASG, but Friends of Dean Row has been told verbally by a Cheshire East councillor that the members of the ASG are included in the list of Acknowledgements on page 35, ie:


- Glam Mams
- Fulshaw WI
- Wilmslow Cricket Club
- CETRA (please let us know if anyone is aware of this body, as we are unable to identify it)
- Wilmslow Business Group
- Friends of the Carrs
- Wilmslow Health Centre
- Wilmslow Trust

- Living Streets

- Cycle Wilmslow

- Wilmslow High School

- Transition Town Wilmslow

- Cheshire Constabulary

- Churches Together in Wilmslow

- Wilmslow Guild

- Evans Trust

- Cheshire Peaks and Plains Housing Trust

- The Schools Council

This list begs many, many questions (email us with yours ahead of the meeting with Councillors!).  But in particular: how is the ASG suitably qualified to calculate the target number of new houses for Wilmslow to 2030?  This is a highly complex and technical question.  There is no explanation in the Vision document as to how 1,500 was arrived at as the ASG's proposal.  It is hard to avoid the suspicion that it was picked pretty much out of thin air, on the virtue that it's a nice round number somewhere between the two ends of the range requested by Cheshire East (ie 500 to 2,200, although the justification for this range is equally opaque)!

These questions should have been addressed in the Wilmslow Vision.  Without answers, the whole consultation process lack validity.  They need answering, fast.