THE South Downs National Park Authority has requested that Milland changes the name of its neighbourhood plan to “Milland Neighbourhood Development Plan”.

National park authority members want it changed to avoid confusion over the abbreviation MNP – which it felt could be interpreted as “Milland National Park”.

Started back in 2013 with grant funding, the first draft of the Milland document was launched in April for pre-submission consultation within the whole parish and among more than 30 statutory bodies and comments were received in time for its deadline on June 5.

Since then planning committee members of the national park authority have expressed admiration for Milland’s commendable community spirit and the huge effort that the community had put into developing the plan, the excellent aims and principles behind the policies and the challenge for the community who had produced the plan without external planning expertise.

They noted there were problems caused by the fact that the South Downs National Park Authority’s own Local Plan is still evolving and that Milland made every effort to take the “emerging” park authority policies into account.

But the park’s governing body decided Milland must draw a formal settlement boundary around the built-up area of the core village. To date, under the Chichester District local plan, the whole of Milland parish has been regarded as an area with the presumption against new development.

By defining the village within a settlement boundary that part of the parish would become an area with a presumption for development.

The next stage is to redraft the plan in the light of all responses received by the Milland Neighbourhood Development Plan steering committee before submitting it formally to the South Downs National Park Authority for a “regulation 16” consultation, before the authority submits the plan to an independent examiner and eventually to a referendum at which everybody on the local government electoral roll for Milland parish would have the final say.