Right houses, right places
Here across the Chichester Coastal Plain we are seeing destruction on a daily basis. Government officials known as Planning Inspectors are parachuted in to give verdicts on whether a development should go ahead – which 90% of the time they do, despite written evidence to the contrary by these communities who have local knowledge and know that they will forever suffer the consequences of bad decision making. These communities are
NOT saying there should be no developments. What they are saying is we need the right houses in the right places that do not:
• Concrete over BMV Grade 1 and 2 rich and finite agricultural land
• Build on known flood plains that when built then flood surrounding housing
• That will suffer from climate change
• That are inevitably going to be flooded from coastal erosion
• That are polluted from continual underinvestment from Southern Water
• That the sewage is poisoning our beautiful fragile harbours and rivers
• That are identikit developments with no understanding of local vernacular
• That damage highly sensitive and protected AONB of Chichester Harbour
• That cause huge increases in traffic on existing inadequate infrastructure
• That are often second homes
• That are not sufficiently ‘sustainable’
• That are not within the ‘affordable’ or ‘social’ brackets of value
• That are totally inappropriate to being adjacent to a Roman, Medieval, Georgian gem that is the City of Chichester, Capital of West Sussex
• That all the young that are educated at our schools, colleges, and universities all leave the area thus cancelling out generations that we need to invest in and bring life back into the city because they are unable to afford the housing which is an average of £425,000.
There is a growing number of non-government agencies and charities providing intelligent views on good housing and town development, but not all of them.
If there are so many experts out there who know the right way forward, why is the country being saturated with poorly sited, poorly designed ghettos, rather than new communities designed for our modern life.
It is because the people responsible are not listening. The elected MPS and Councillors are not the designers of the NPPF, the building regs, or the local development rules.
All of these are the responsibility of the Civil Service, so it is responsible to point the accusation for the sorry state of affairs on the non-elected Civil Service and the developer community, whose primary objective is shareholder value.
It is these two groups who need re-education, and a new purpose to do what the country is crying out for. Libby Alexander SOSCA.CO.UK (Save Our South Coast Alliance)