In the absence of the Local Plan developers are progressing speculative applications across the district. Parishes and local communities, many of whom are actively progressing Neighbourhood Plans, find themselves opposing large developments.
Development raises the question of increased flood risk, a key concern in the minds of local communities on the coastal plan. Sustainable Drainage Schemes (SUDS) continue to be rolled out in every development as the solution, but there are serious doubts about whether they work where ground water levels are high, an issue that is being progressed with the local authorities.
Martin Beaton (District Convener)
The final public consultation on Arun's Draft Core Strategy was expected this summer but, having postponed it while its housing-market assessment is reviewed, ADC is no nearer to having in place a new Local Plan – or at least a tested housebuilding figure - capable of defeating opportunist applications for greenfield housing development that demand to be allowed as NPPF-default ‘sustainable development’.
Like many councils in a similar position, ADC finds itself facing the risk that refusal of such applications will be overturned on appeal on the grounds that the District lacks the NPPF requirement of a five-year supply of deliverable housebuilding land as a result of its failure to achieve the level of housebuilding required by its South East Plan allocation, which Inspectors have ruled must be followed until a new Local Plan figure has been approved.
Thus Inspectors recently allowed an appeal involving 107 units south of Lake Lane, Yapton, and are likely to do the same in a recently-heard appeal involving 85 units east of Woodgate Road, Westergate, while also since our last Report, an appeal has been lodged against ADC’s rejection of 38 houses at The Lillies Caravan Park, Yapton Road, Barnham.
An application has recently been submitted for a further 268 units on open land between Eastergate (Fontwell Avenue) and Westergate (Northfields Lane), even though applications for over 380 units on three sites around Angmering remain undecided (the applicants being presumably content to wait for the village to be definitively designated a ‘strategic growth area’).
One small victory for the principle of Plan-led development has been the withdrawal of an application for 34 houses south of Fellows Gardens, Yapton, and another the Council’s refusal of BMW-Chandler’s application for a new garage complex in the East Preston-Ferring Strategic Gap - against which there has been no appeal.
Peter Carder (Planning)
