Lindfield Society have written to MSDC with our views on the latest phase of review of the District Plan. The Society will be attending the review in person at the end of October. We wrote:

“It is a cause for concern, given the changes both in national planning policy legislation and in MSDC’s administration, that the Council’s new leadership is not taking the opportunity of this review to bring housing targets down to a realistic level. We understand that the recent change to the NPPF making the “standard method” of assessing housing need “an advisory starting point” rather than obligatory (para 61) is not all it seems at first glance. The NPPF still sets the bar high for councils that wish to depart from earlier, centrally dictated targets.

We understand also that MSDC has taken legal advice on this point, but question whether the Council has probed sufficiently to find a way to free the district from increasingly unrealistic targets. What is needed is to insist on hearing precisely what conditions must be satisfied in order to depart from the standard method and then to build a case on that basis. Both the previous MSDC administration and the CPRE have analysed housing need and produced substantially lower numbers. We see no evidence that the current Council leadership has engaged with these studies.

It is worth recalling that during the current plan period, it took the council eight years (2014/15 – 2021/22) to meet the cumulative housing target based on 876 units per year. This was only done by relying on (one-off) large-scale development at Burgess Hill and by approving schemes elsewhere that would earlier have been refused. This surely demonstrates how unreasonable the original requirement was. Driving the target still higher to 1,090, and backdating it as planned to 2020/21, would immediately push the district back into deficit. Speculative developers will of course be able to exploit this by arguing that the Council is in default. We already have a would-be developer in Lindfield proposing to build on a site excluded from the District Plan. Others will be circling.

It is sometimes argued that an established District Plan, regardless of the housing target, is better than a wild west in which developers do as they please. But if the District Plan largely gives them what they want anyway, it simply becomes a wild west by another name. This is the danger we face in Mid Sussex. District policies supporting character and design, ecology, infrastructure, open spaces and recreation risk being swept away by more overdevelopment. The housing number is the linchpin of the District Plan, the critical element that will determine whether all other ambitions in the plan succeed or fail. We urge the Council to think again and reduce housing numbers to a realistic level.”