Horsham District Council due to announce which housing sites will be included in its emerging Local Plan

The Plan, which is three years overdue, will be considered at a meeting of the full council on December 11.

If all councillors are happy with its content, it will be put out to a six-week public consultation between January 19 and March 1 2024.

Among the sites earmarked for thousands of homes are Adversane, Billingshurst, West Grinstead, Southwater and west of Ifield.

John Milne, cabinet member for planning & infrastructure, said the council had managed to reduce the number of homes proposed for some of the sites and had taken out some of the areas that were ‘particularly unpopular’.

But he would not say which. That information will be revealed when the agenda for December’s meeting is published.

There have been repeated delays to the publishing of the Plan, the last being in January when things ground to a halt while the council waited to hear about Michael Gove’s planning reforms.

With planning policies which are extremely out of date and only a three-year supply of housing land to its name, rather than the required five, the district has been left unable to fight back against unwanted development.

Only Natural England’s position statement on water neutrality has slowed things down.

Water neutrality essentially means that the amount of water used in an area before development is the same or lower after new homes are built.

It’s an issue which members of Save Rural Southwater described as the only tool residents had to challenge government housing targets.

Spokesman Andrew Bardot said: “As residents we rely on our elected district councillors to protect the district’s water supply, to robustly challenge government targets and to ensure the strict application of water neutrality requirements to development applications submitted to the [council].

“Whether they will do either, neither or both, time – and the new Local Plan when published – will tell.

“But in the meantime the residents of our district need to be fully aware of the crucial importance of this issue and of the risks to the water supply in the district of a failure to robustly challenge housing targets and to properly apply, monitor and enforce water neutrality for all development applications.”

No one can claim that the council hasn’t opposed the housing targets – it’s been the subject of many a letter from many a leader over the past couple of years.

Mr Milne said there were advantages to pushing the Local Plan through while the current rules surrounding water neutrality were in place.

He added: “If we delay even six months and the water neutrality defence goes, then our [housing] numbers could jump very considerably – 50 per cent extra, that sort of level.”

Another reason not to delay further is a government edict which came in to play in October which changes the way Local Plans have to be written.

The change will give Plans ‘a less local flavour’ with local development management policies over-ruled if they conflict with the national policies.

This won’t apply to the emerging Plan but will for the next one.

Mr Milne said: “Everything has come down to a sort of race against time.

“People are going to dislike some sites in the Plan – that’s going to happen – but the disadvantages of delaying greatly exceed any possible advantage of what they might get out of it.

“Very large sites [would] go through that are unplanned for, cause all kinds of problems, don’t come with a school or something like that.

“We need to act now and, frankly, we probably should have acted in January.”

While acknowledging that the new Plan is ‘way, way over schedule’, Mr Milne recognised the benefits to the delays.

Pointing to the way the world has shifted over the past few years, particularly on the environmental front, he said: “This [delay] gives us an opportunity to update our policies in line with our ambitions – and one of our ambitions as a new council is inspiring greener futures.”

Those greener futures include the need for developers to go ‘above and beyond’ the Future Homes standard when it comes to eco-building new homes – cutting down on carbon emissions and hopefully cutting chunks from people’s energy bills.

The language in the Active Travel policy has been strengthened, pushing developers right from the start to design streets around pedestrians and cyclists rather than cars.

Than there are nature recovery networks, wildlife corridors and the protection of open spaces.

No matter how much work has already been carried out in any of these areas, putting them in the Local Plan would prevent developers from claiming that a project would be too expensive if they had to be included.

Planning inspectors would not allow the Plan to proceed if its requirements and policies were unfair or unworkable.

Mr Milne said: “It’s very important that we give ourselves this ability to control development in the way that we want.”

Once the six-week consultation is complete, the Plan and all the responses will be sent to the Planning Inspectorate in June, with hearings expected to be held in October or November.

The council hopes to adopt the new Local Plan in 2025.

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