Ray Dawe: the final decision is the inspector’s

Two weeks ago I wrote about the government requiring councils to provide jobs along with new houses. This brought me a number of emails and comments. These tend to centre on the idea that our district council should stand up to the government and (I quote) ‘not just roll over’ or to accept that we need more houses but then that we should put them in places other than suggested.

The argument put forward for not doing as the government requires is based around the idea that we should either choose a low number of houses to build or simply do nothing at all, ie have no plan.

Fighting talk this may sound but having no plan would simply mean that we would continue to be totally vulnerable to any developer who can find an empty field and put in a planning application.

Unless there are exceptional circumstances, as we have already found, we would find it extremely difficult to stop them getting permission from an appeal inspector to build.

The argument for going for a low number of new houses fails because any number we choose has to go before a government appointed inspector and, as we have seen elsewhere in the country, if that inspector judges this number as being too low the plan gets rejected and so we start all over again.

Recently, other local councils have suffered this fate – Brighton has just been told by a government inspector to look how they can increase their numbers and maybe by up to a third. The longer the delay, the longer we are exposed to developers bringing forward planning applications.

This brings me to the other main comment that I received - that the ideas put forward in our new strategy are wrong.