ABSTRACT
As the first Simplified Planning Zone the Sir Francis Ley Industrial Park in Derby has attracted a good deal of attention from practitioners, the professional press and academic studies. Derby is a city of around 210,000 people located in the east Midlands. Wards around the zone have higher proportions of partly and unskilled labour than Derby and Derbyshire as a whole and lower proportions of skilled and professional/managerial employees. The Derbyshire Fire Service wanted detailed building layouts to enable them to comment. The deposit scheme had undergone two significant changes since it was initially envisaged. The first was a focusing of the uses permitted under the scheme. Second, control over sensitive boundaries and landscape sub-zones had been relaxed to ensure the scheme reached the required Department of the Environment gearing ratio for City Grant applications and to avoid a formal objection at the deposit stage by the landowner which may have led to a public inquiry.
