A moratorium on house building in the district until there are guarantees for suitable infrastructure
upgrades to the A27 junctions and wastewater treatment.

I have read the plan, all of it, and the biggest thought that comes into my mind is that there appears to be very little promised...
What appears to be guaranteed/promised
Ten thousand odd dwellings squeezed into approximately 20% of the available land space.
What is not guaranteed/promised
No new roads or traffic congestion mitigation. The roads around Chichester and the surrounding areas are at capacity already and have been for some time, (Transport assessment Jan 2023) with the exception of the Covid lockdown period. My business involves engineers driving to visit customers in and around this area are a considerable amount of the working day is wasted in traffic congestion. At not an inconsiderable cost. For example, one of my engineers lives in Bognor Regis and what was a 35-minute journey to work - in Bosham - now takes 60 minutes. 60 minutes. More frequent flooding and closures of roads exacerbate this and the new Free school sited on Hunston Road, has compounded the misery. Of course, these delays that everyone experiences only compound the pollution issue as well. This can only get worse with the additional promised housing in the area. Working in and around the area will be chaos.
No new sewage infrastructure is guaranteed for the foreseeable future.
Chichester Harbour and the streets of Bosham are regularly filled with sewage that overflows whenever there is rain. According to Southern Waters’ own Beach Boy App data, there are regular non-stop discharges of Sewage into Chichester Harbour. There is nothing in the plan to stop this and Southern Water themselves say that they don't have the capacity to deal with the wastewater at present, let alone with another Ten Thousand houses built in the medium term. All the E.Cioli levels in the Harbour are already above acceptable levels as advised by the Environment Agency. Table enclosed - figures supplied by the Clean Harbour Partnership.
Attached is the document that explains this testing
No doctor surgeries
None planned
No new schools for the majority of these new housing developments
So despite the positive language of the Plan, there are no plans to provide any new schools for that area, except for the Tangmere proposed development. So in the absence of such plans, I have to ask where in the area are. I don't know about the availability of school places around the area except for Bosham and Chidham where there are none.
General observations
There don’t appear to be many proposed developments for this housing on Brownfield sites. All the major developments in the area appear to be on Grade 1 and 2 agricultural land. Some of which, i.e. Highgrove Farm, which is outside the settlement boundary, appears against National Planning Policy Guidance and local opinion.
So in conclusion, this Plan appears to be solely a cash-generating exercise by Chichester District Council, with income derived from Section 106/CIL levies and forecasted Council Tax receipts, which gives no apparent regard, or only Lip Service, to the quality of life and areas of natural beauty for the existing residents and proposed new residents. It is not a really well thought out plan, not joined up at all with the needs and requirements of the local and separate Utilities and Government agencies such as Transport.
I am not against new housing generally. I'm sure there is a need for future generations and increased population in the County, But this cannot be allowed without all the other facilities that should come along with new housing. This Plan does not plan for that. If there is no funding available to upgrade these facilities, then I can’t see how it is sensible to allow more new housing on this scale.
Yours sincerely Roger Weymouth
Dear all (Sent local councillors, responses removed)
I’ve looked at some possible “road improvements” notably one just outside Tesco which looks like there will be a possibility of multiway lights and a new junction but removing an existing one coming onto the roundabout from the industrial site. Just makes me wonder how much busier this junction will be if they feel the need to re-do the junction. I cannot see how a traffic light system will
improve anything and this strikes me as a case of trying to polish a turd. There will just be too much traffic because of ill-thought-out planning and too many new houses but minus the traffic network improvements required. I also read somewhere that a model or
something shows that if there are no improvements to this area, it will result in a 29-minute wait time at the Tesco roundabout for traffic coming from Bosham way at AM and PM peak times. 29 minutes! Are the planners trying to destroy the quality of life around these parts?
I do not hold much hope for real improvements to the road network, if, after any housing gets the go-ahead in this plan. I quote a paragraph from the Chichester District Council Duty to Co-operate Statement (May 2014). Item 3.10 it states “ The Highways Agency is confident that the works on the A27 Chichester Bypass required to support development set out in the Local Plan can be delivered.
The Stantec Chichester District Council Local Plan Transport Assessment (Jan 2023) states:
• "The adopted Chichester Local Plan (LP) 2014-2029, included a set of mitigation measures at the 6 principal
junctions along the A27 corridor. Although there have been works at the Portfield Roundabout in this timeline, no other mitigation schemes have been completed along the A27 corridor, as such the mitigation schemes defined in this report will also be required to consider the development from this plan period."
So it seems that all this was promised back then and then shelved and the road network is now pretty much unusable on a daily basis, despite the promises of the Highways Agency. So we have a situation where we all try and bypass the Bypass
I would have thought that any new developments, roadworks etc are meant to be progress, or progressive. Not regressive to the local community and those of us who work in the area.
Perhaps there needs to be a moratorium on all new housing in the district until guaranteed measures are in place to improve the road network. This is not guaranteed in the plan. (Point 8.5)