Dear Sir,
According to Cllr Dawe, “we don’t want any more houses is the fairly frequent cry from the letters column of the West Sussex County Times” (WSCT 29 Nov 12). This is of course a misrepresentation of the views of those of us who are very concerned that Cllr Dawe and his Cabinet colleagues are determined to adopt a house building target for our District that is equal to or greater than that set by the South East Plan .
Contrary to a statement by a member of the HDC’s Cabinet at a recent council meeting, Local Planning Authorities, and therefore Horsham District Council, can opt for house-building targets less than set by the South East Plan. This was made clear by Baroness Hanham, Under Secretary of State: ‘Abolition of Regional Strategies’,25 July 2012, quote:.“Local authorities can also bring forward proposals (for example on housing targets) which have a local interpretation to them in their plans, based on their own sound evidence base where that is justified by the local circumstances. That evidence base is likely to be more up to date than that included in the Regional Strategies. Each case will depend on its particular fact”.
A significant ‘particular fact’ for Horsham District is that the huge house-building target set by the South East Plan for the District, of 650 new houses per year, has been shown to be excessive and has not been met. This is hardly surprising given that the number of houses allotted to Horsham District by the Plan was determined during the boom years before the recession - in expectation of continued and rapid economic growth and job creation at Crawley and Gatwick - with an anticipated resultant need for thousands of new houses to accommodate an enlarged workforce. Instead, the anticipated level of economic growth has not occurred and there has been no significant increase in job vacancies in consequence.
Whereas the authors of the South East Plan allocated 13,000 new houses to Horsham District in expectation that the new houses would be needed in consequence of significant economic growth, HDC’s decision makers seem to believe that the economy can be made to grow and lasting jobs created simply by building thousands of new houses. This is an extraordinary presumption because substantive evidence linking levels of house building directly to employment and job creation seems to be lacking. It is not a sound basis for making a critical decision that will have far reaching consequences for Horsham District and its communities.
Yours faithfully,
Dr R F Smith
For and on behalf of CPRE Sussex – Horsham & Crawley