Rejecting the city plan would be a big mistake

THE City Plan proposal for an additional 1,180 homes on the urban fringe was always going to be controversial.

The quest for more sites has been forced upon the city by the Government’s planning inspector who wants to see significantly more than the 11,400 homes already proposed.

Her views are perhaps understandable when even the new figure will be well short of the 18,000 to 24,000 likely to be needed over the next 20 years.

Inevitably many of those living close to the urban fringe don’t want to see a single home built on sites like Mile Oak Fields and Meadow Vale in Ovingdean. These are sites that they have come to accept as part of the landscape, part of their view.

Unfortunately what many don’t realise is that, unless the City Plan is passed and adopted, there won’t be anything to limit the number of homes built on these and other urban fringe sites. Without a Plan allocating specific, manageable and carefully thought-out numbers, planning applications will be judged by the yardstick of the National Planning Policy Framework with its default position of granting consent.

Developers won’t be proposing dozens of homes on sites like Ovingdean, it’ll be hundreds.

And the old chestnut, often trotted out by NIMBYs, of using brownfield sites for housing doesn’t wash either. Practically all of the development areas identified in the City Plan are brownfield in nature. And, more often than not, building at densities that can’t be realistically increased.

But so much more depends on the City Plan being passed. It’s not just about housing. It protects sites for jobs and our unique cultural offer with policies on offices, theatres, cinemas, leisure facilities and hotels. It sets architectural and design standards that will prevent a repetition of the mistakes of the past and it has policies to oblige developers to use local labour and offer apprenticeships.

It has policies on health, inequality, transport, education and sport. Without an adopted Plan all would count for nought in local decision making.

The City Plan goes back to the Inspector later this month. Having been shunted back to the city council for revision twice already, it is in the last chance saloon. If it is rejected it goes back to a four-year drawing board and while the planners furiously scribble, bricks will be laid with abandon.

The Economic Partnership urges politicians and people to get behind it for the good of the city.

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