Mid Sussex update (January 2016)

The most significant story is the painfully rumbling saga of the District Council’s flailing attempts to pin down a draft of its new long term District Plan (it will run until 2031) that is fit to present to the Planning Inspectorate for public examination.  We report separately below on the latest position, and on the representations that CPRE Sussex has made to the Council on the most recent changes that it has proposed to its draft plan.  We remain deeply unhappy with key aspects of that draft Plan.  It is too important and will be too longlasting for it to be wrong.

Residents of Hassocks in Mid Sussex are celebrating their success in fighting off a misguided application by developers, Gleesons, to build 97 houses in a strategic gap between Hassocks and Hurstpierpoint.  And that success is all down to their own hard work in developing their own case and robust evidence.

The arrival of the new Government provides fresh impetus for CPRE Sussex to take forward its anti-fracking campaign.

It goes to the heart of that campaign that the British Geological Survey concluded last year that shale layers below the Weald basin are unlikely to hold significant amounts of exploitable gas but may well hold substantial amounts of oil - though the BGS report that the amount that would be commercially recoverable remains very uncertain and depends as much on economic and political factors as geological ones.

The Campaign to Protect Rural England has warned Mid Sussex District Council that its latest District Plan proposals, ones that will shape our District between now and 2031, fail to protect the District from rapid urbanisation. MSDC has just closed a public consultation exercise on its proposed Plan. “Adoption of a new Plan must not provide our Council with an implicit mandate to abandon Mid Sussex’s essentially rural character” says CPRE Sussex trustee, Michael Brown.

I think that we can afford to raise one cheer for our MPs for decisions they have taken on the future of the fracking industry. In their final Commons debate on the latest Infrastructure Bill the Government made concessions that give effect to significant points for which CPRE has campaigned both nationally and locally here in Sussex.

We have been taking stock of the results of our interventions in recent planning applications and planning appeals in Mid Sussex. Of the last 10 cases in which we have intervened, we await the result in 4 cases: the planning wheels can grind exceedingly slow!. Of those that have been determined, we are delighted to say that in 4 cases the planning application has either been withdrawn or turned down (in one case after the developer's appeal was rejected on grounds that we argued for) or granted subject to conditions that CPRE advocated. It would be inappropriate hubris to claim that CPRE is solely responsible for these good results, but we do hope that our arguments at least served to focus minds on the core arguments and to galvanise public opinion.

Since the last District report in May, there have been a few planning decisions to cheer. These decisions encourage us in our ongoing campaign to ensure that environmental considerations that foster our precious local countryside and its rural heritage are properly weighed in the planning balance against the need (which we fully recognise) for new homes.

1 August 2014

CPRE calls for more focus on shale oil exploitation implications for Sussex in its submission on WSCC’s proposed new minerals local policy

CPRE Sussex has made representations to West Sussex County Council (WSCC) on the early stage background documents that will inform WSCC and the South Downs National Park Authority in their development of a new joint minerals local plan for Mid Sussex to replace their current (2003) out-of-date plan.