Our mission is to protect the whole Torbay environment in a way that underpins the local economy, maintaining all that is best in the balance between development and an effective, enhanced and beautiful Heritage environment.

TcHT Principal Aims

• Engaging people in improving, preserving and protecting their local environment
• Preserving and respecting the distinctiveness of Torbay
• Conserving and enhancing the natural environment
• Protecting parks, open spaces and the surrounding countryside
• Conserving and protecting biodiversity
• Supporting and protecting rural England
• Conserving and enhancing the historic environment
• Conserving listed and key unlisted historic buildings and their settings
• Achieving well-designed places, high standards of architecture and planning
• Supporting planning policies to fight climate change
• Achieving environmental sustainable new development
• Ensuring the vitality of the town centres

TcHT Strategy to Serve Torbay
We support a substantiated-based planning system which balances the need for development against any harm that might be caused to Torbay’s distinctive heritage, its beauty and tranquility, to the surrounding countryside, The aim is to scrutinise proposals for need, location and intensity of development, while supporting responsible development that supports tourism. 

The planning system is currently under sustained assault. Instead of being a mechanism for balancing competing claims on Torbay’s land and heritage, some elites / politicians are biased towards a dash for growth that will irrevocably damage the distinctiveness and unique character of Torbay and affect the economy in the long term. This would be an unworthy legacy for our future generations.

We do not oppose any new developments on principle. On the contrary, we recognise all too well the necessity of new developments. It is how these goals are achieved that divides rational and objective opinion.

Over the coming years we will work to raise awareness of the distinctiveness of Torbay, where the culture, heritage, coast and countryside are all at risk.

This perspective will also inform our work in examining individual case proposals, including small developments but especially as regards major developments. We will bear mind the material considerations contained in the Torbay Local Plan, the Neighbourhood Plan, the National Planning Policy Framework and a multitude of new Local and National planning legislation for greater “environmental“ control.

We will also raise objections when statutory consultee recommendations – most notably and importantly those of Historic England and the Victorian Society – are overriden.