Comment: Government must rethink way of calculating West Sussex’s housebuilding targets

The prized rolling South Downs protected by a national park are largely sacrosanct.

To the South, the sea defines a natural barrier.

In the runway in-between and to the north around Horsham, flood plain, treasured harbour, and a mass of historic congestion and traffic makes more development both difficult and undesirable.

Yet Government demands persist for endless building, irrespective of the lack of infrastructure, and everyone knows that more housing is essential so that everyone can have a decent place to live.

So we welcome the commonsense intervention in the House of Commons this week by Arundel and South Downs MP Andrew Griffith.

‘Standard methodology’ won’t mean much to the average person but it could have huge ramifications for the future of this area.

The Government wants to introduce a new method of calculating future housing requirements and the upshot could be thousands of extra new homes a year being built across West Sussex.

Our councils have been proactive in trying to find the most suitable locations for new development, but a lot of this work will be bulldozed if ministers do not change their minds.

Developments of all shapes and sizes would have to be approved dotted all over our beautiful county, and if past performance is anything to go by, without the necessary infrastructure to fully support them.

The new standard methodology for calculating housing requirements as currently proposed has some very glaring fundamental flaws.

These were brilliantly highlighted by Mr Griffith in the Commons, where he eloquently and succinctly laid out the key issues. We would urge all our elected representatives at whatever level to continue putting pressure on government ministers to change their minds.

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