CPRE lends its support to our housing campaign
CPRE, the Countryside Charity, has pledged its support to our housing campaign as it gets underway this week.
The organisation said
Sussex needed a planning system which provided more protection for greenfield land.
In a joint statement, professor Dan Osborn, chairman of CPRE Sussex, and trustee Dr Roger
Smith said: “CPRE Sussex welcomes the campaign for a better planning system where local voices get heard and where priority is given to meeting the need that local people have for truly affordable homes.
“The current system does nothing for levelling-up and fails to provide climateready communities.
“Sussex communities need a planning system that recognises the value of greenfields for producing food and storing carbon and water, and for nature and wellbeing.”
The duo called on the Prime Minister to take action.
They said: “The Prime Minister must adopt policies affording greater protection to greenfield sites to keep his promises on the environment that benefits us all. Our local authorities are being made to push on regardless, no matter what the consequences are for local communities and the environment.
“The current approach is unsustainable and could be seen to be reckless since we cannot keep taking bites out of nature without it biting back. The South East is already running out of water and sewage problems are common.
“Communities are already protesting. What is needed urgently now and for the future is planning that is empirical and pragmatic, and community led – and that would let councils set their own housing targets. “There are many reasons why Sussex communities are recognising that current circumstances are exceptional, and where circumstances are exceptional official guidance allows councils to set their own targets.”
In a letter sent to our newspapers last month, Dr Smith outlined the issue that central government housing calculations were causing. He said councils will be required to recalculate their housing needs as early as next month.
He said: ”Except where an alternative approach is warranted, councils are required to use the formula-based Standard Method to determine their ‘minimum housing need figure’, as stipulated by the government in its Guidance: Housing and Economic Needs Assessment’, which guides councils in how to assess their housing needs. “The formula uses 2014-based National Household Growth Projections, published by the Office for National Statistics (ONS), to which is added an ‘affordability’ factor using ‘median workplace-based affordability ratios’. The latter are due to be published for each local authority in March. Present housing targets, which are already huge and unprecedented, will doubtless be increased.
“This in turn will increase the number of houses that are beyond the capacity of [many councils] to accommodate, which will increase substantially the number of houses shifted to Horsham and Mid Sussex to accommodate, under the pernicious ‘Duty to Cooperate’.
“In addition, the guidance states that ‘there will be circumstances where it is appropriate to consider whether actual housing need is higher than the standard method indicates’, a stipulation that developers will exploit to push numbers ever upwards.
“And when developers choose to build fewer houses than is required by Standard Method targets, councils and communities will have development imposed on them by developers with the approval of the government, as is happening now across Sussex.
“Note, that ‘affordability’ in the context of the Standard Method is a misnomer because the application of the method’s affordability factor has not increased the delivery of truly affordable homes.
“Note also that the Standard Method takes no account of the resulting environmental consequences, including impact on the supply of potable water and increased outflows of raw and partially treated sewage into rivers, and of course making worse the consequences of climate change.
“The present reckless press-on-regardless-nevermind-the-consequences approach to planning must stop.”