Hawkesbury City Council’s Draft Hawkesbury Employment Lands Strategy is available for view and comment on Council’s community engagement website, Your Hawkesbury – Your Say at and at Council’s Administration Building, 366 George Street, Windsor until Monday, 12 October 2020.
Preparation of the Draft Hawkesbury Employment Lands Strategy has been undertaken in order to address the Sydney Region Plan and Western City District Plan, and inform the Local Strategic Planning Statement and subsequent review of the Local Environmental Plan and Development Control Plan.
The objectives of the Draft Hawkesbury Employment Lands Strategy are to:
- identify and review the existing employment lands in the local government area and allocate employment lands to be retained for future employment purposes
- identify and address challenges and opportunities for all employment lands, including tourism, business and industrial
- identify mechanisms to optimise constrained industrial precincts to transition to new uses.
- investigate the opportunity for an agglomerated precinct at Clarendon
- prepare an Employment Lands Strategy as a guiding document for future land use planning, investment and management.
The key considerations to emerge from research associated with the Draft Hawkesbury Employment Lands Strategy include:
- planning policy overview
- high level employment structure
- high level demographics
- industry sectors and economic anchors
- industry trends and emerging business opportunities.
The Draft Hawkesbury Employment Lands Strategy identified the following opportunities in Key Industry Sectors and Economic Anchors:
- agriculture
- freight network
- education
- Defence/RAAF Base Richmond
- equine
- tourism.
Key recommendations of the Draft Hawkesbury Employment Lands Strategy include:
- agribusiness: working with stakeholders in Clarendon to progress the agricultural strength of the local government area
- developing new research, development, employment and career pathways for local residents and students, particularly in relation to sustainable fresh produce processing.
The Draft Hawkesbury Rural Lands Strategy provides further detail with respect to the wider local government area opportunities associated with agribusiness:
- supermarket, hospitality and bulky good floor space: as population projections and retail spending analysis indicates these types of commodity goods will be in the most demand in the future
- small scale healthcare providers: to support the local population as it ages
- small scale commercial services: such as local accounting and law firms, that provide a ‘population serving commercial role’ in centres
- light industry and urban services: given the wealth of industrial lands in the local government area the focus should be towards developing a diversity of lots and attracting smaller operators in order to be in a position to address the competition from other industrial lands in Western Sydney that are better connected
- tourism: given the existing strategic intent in planning documents to grow this industry and the wealth of assets (nature/fresh produce/heritage) that already exist in the local government area.
