Objection to the Chichester District Council (CDC) Draft Local Plan
I am writing to object to the new draft Chichester District Council (CDC) Local Plan which proposes to allocate a further 125 houses in Loxwood for the period 2019 to 2035. This is in addition to the 60 already allocated in the current Local Plan and, allowing for some further housing on small windfall sites, will result in more than 200 new houses in the village in less than 20 years.

My objection to the draft Local Plan is based on sustainability and the process by which it was developed as described below.

Firstly, the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) part 2 requires that Local Plans and planning applications deliver sustainable development while para 4 of the draft Local Plan also seeks to deliver sustainable development through the following elements:

* the pattern of need and demand for housing and employment across the area;
* infrastructure capacity and constraints, in particular relating to wastewater treatment, roads and transport;
* environmental constraints - avoiding flood risk areas, protecting the environment designations, landscape quality, the historic environment and settlement character; and
* the availability of potential housing sites, their deliverability and phasing.

However, by allocating a further 125 new house to Loxwood CDC is failing to meet those elements at all given that:

* Southern Water has stated that the Loxwood Sewage infrastructure has no more capacity while there are no plans to update the infrastructure in its 2020 to 2025 spending plans;
* Loxwood does not have any viable public transport system; just one bus a day each way between Cranleigh and Guildford;
* residents have to commute by road to work as there's no employment in Loxwood;
* parts of Loxwood are prone to both fluvial and surface water flooding;
* Loxwood has little local demand for open market housing.

Secondly, national planning guidance makes it quite clear that district councils should carry out "desktop" studies of potential housing sites and then consult with the parishes. However, CDC has not followed this guidance and instead issued a call for sites for developers to respond to. Thus the allocation of another 125 houses to Loxwood has been driven by developers yet Kirdford and Plaistow/ Ifold have not been allocated any and Wisborough Green just 25 houses. No parish consultations took place about site allocations and no effort has been made to share the housing burden across the three parishes defined by CDC as "Service Villages".

In conclusion, I am objecting to CDC's new draft Local Plan as in developing it CDC has failed the sustainability requirements of both the NPPF and its own plan while also ignoring planning guidance regarding potential housing sites.