‘Scapegoats’ for housing
Villagers in Chidham and Hambrook are concerned the area is seen as an ‘easy target’ for new housing allocations.
Villagers fear Chidham and Hambrook are being treated as housing scapegoats as they are too small to fight back.
The Neighbourhood Plan Steering Group, chaired by Stephen Johnson, and the Chidham, Hambrook and Nutbourne East Residents Association (CHANE) Action Group, set up by Richard Weavis, are co-ordinating a challenge to the ‘huge number’ of houses allocated to Chidham, Hambrook and Nutbourne East in the Chichester Local Plan Review 2035.
Andrew Kerry-bedell, who is working with both groups, said: “The council has a focus of 90 per cent of its house building plans along the eastwest corridor and there can only be one conclusion.
“Chidham and Hambrook, along the A259, is seen by the council and developers as an easy, sacrificial target, despite this road currently being in the top 30 most dangerous roads in the UK for accidents.
“Unless things change, the future outlook for Chidham and Hambrook looks depressing.”
Andrew moved into the parish eight years ago and said he had already seen ‘what had been a fairly steady ten-minute drive down the A259 heading to Portsmouth become a 20-minute slog, due to the dramatic increase in traffic along the main road’.
He has seen the Lion Park development go up in Hambrook, as well as multiple small and large developments along the A259.
What he and other residents cannot accept, they say, is the allocation of a further 500 homes to a community that currently has less than 1,000 houses in total.
He believes the number of houses allocated by Chichester District Council is based on an out-ofdate housing allocation calculation being used by central government, despite Office for National Statistics’ data suggesting these figures can no longer be justified.
A petition to the government to ‘stop councils being forced to build twice the houses we need’ was recently rejected but villagers remain determined to fight the numbers and to challenge the way housing needs are calculated.
Andrew said the unique nature of the villages was in jeopardy, adding: “We are three small villages. We have no post office, no doctor’s surgery, we don’t even have a convenience store.”