House targets are illogical

I am afraid I must counter Mr Mead-brigg's assessment of the facts as laid out by John Nelson, chair of the Chichester Harbour Trust. Mr Nelson is completely right that the environment is facing an existential crisis and the infrastructure cannot hold. The new Local Plan will not make much of a dent in these problems if overdevelopment is allowed to continue apace here.

What is critical – and massively overdue – is to question the overtly illogical basis on which these houses – so lucrative for developers but too expensive for locals – are being foisted by Central Government on an area which simply does not have the space: the vast majority of the district (76.5 per cent) cannot be built on as it is National Park or AONB, so thousands of houses are being squeezed into small pockets of land, concreting over the green fields between villages and changing the historic rural landscape – actively sought out by tourists –forever. It is cultural, economic and ecological vandalism. Why is this policy not being challenged?

There is a 10 per cent reduction heralded in the Local Plan – but this still leaves more than 10,000 houses to be built by 2039 – on less than 23.5 per cent of the land, an alarming amount of which is prone to flooding according to the new Strategic Flood Risk Assessment (2022).

More than a Local Plan, we need to advocate for Central Government to see sense and to radically cut housing numbers, making those remaining affordable, sustainable and built on brownfield sites wherever possible.

Chichester and its surrounds have reached the tipping point.