Must continue making a plan

In last week’s letters page Mr Kornycky struggled with the logic of Horsham District Council proceeding with a local plan that ‘will require a higher annual housing target than either the current 800 or the 965 that will apparently apply from November anyway’.

Even ignoring the fact that it is a statutory requirement to revise the plan every five years, he has answered his own question because he recognises that, with or without a plan, the higher housing number will apply anyway.

The crucial difference is that with a plan, the council has some prospect of determining where development will go, and specifying what key infrastructure is necessary.

The revised local plan also covers much more than a housing target. It allocates sites suitable for development and sets out a framework of development management policies that will shape the nature of those developments and can bring about benefits such as biodiversity net gain or climate change adaptations.

Without a revised plan, the council has no prospect of demonstrating a five year land supply and in those circumstances, a presumption in favour of development would apply to any application that the Council receives.

This would make it very likely that the planning inspectorate would approve any applications that the council refused on appeal.

We agree that the Government’s standard methodology for calculating the housing target has many shortcomings and we have already argued that the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on house prices is not yet fully understood.

Despite our efforts, the message from Government is that we must continue with making a plan.

We will continue to challenge the basis of the standard methodology, but it is simplistic to assume that we can ignore it and arbitrarily set a lower housing target.

A planning inspector will review our evidence at examination and determine whether our proposed housing number meets the objectively assessed housing need.

We are doing everything we can to set an achievable target, but it is unquestionably better to have a plan which provides some level of protection than no plan at all which would give the green light to uncontrolled development across the district. CLLR CLAIRE VICKERS Horsham District Council Cabinet Member for Planning and Development