Policy A13 should include the following “Due to the circumstances which require a BLD to be proposed for Southbourne, the provisions of the Council’s ‘Interim Position Statement for Housing April 2022’ will not be applied in Southbourne parish”. A similar statement needs to be added to the “Interim Position Statement for Housing” for consistency.

The HEELA 2021 shows the District Council’s assessment of the potential for housing in Southbourne to be well over 4000 dwellings. However, the parish is not capable of accommodating an unlimited amount of housing.

The parish is under great pressure and this was acknowledged by the reduction of the strategic allocation from 1250 to 1050 in the Council’s letter dated 26th November 2020. The District Council reduced the strategic allocation to take account of an appeal which allowed 199 dwellings on a site in Cooks Lane, Southbourne on 2nd March 2020. (199 dwellings App. No. 18/03/03145/OUT). A letter from the District Council to the Parish Council dated 26th November 2020 stated “… the revised distribution we are testing includes a proposed level of development of 1,250 dwellings for your parish. The working assumption therefore is that your parish council will bring forward a neighbourhood plan identifying sites (of five or more dwellings) to deliver this level of development for the period 2019-2037. Typically, any sites or schemes which already have planning permission, allocated in the existing Local Plan or a “made” Neighbourhood Plan as at 1 April 2020 would not count towards this figure. Nor would development on sites of less than five dwellings, as they count towards the “windfall” figure for the Local Plan Review and so cannot be double counted. The exception to this is the 199 dwellings which have planning permission on the Cook’s Lane site, which I can confirm are envisaged will count towards the 1,250 total.” It appears that, quite rightly, the District Council made this exception because it was recognised that more than 1250 dwellings could not be sustained in the parish.

This pressure continues. There are currently four large applications pending in Southbourne. Those at Penny Lane (23/00024/OUT – 84 dwellings), and Four Acre Nursery (22/01903/OUT – 40 dwellings) lie within the BLD. Hopefully these will be refused as approval would prejudice the intention of Policy A13. A third lies outside the BLD at Gosden Green Nursery (21/02238/FULEIA – 29 dwellings) and the outcome of an appeal is awaited. The fourth (21/01910/OUT – 63 dwellings) lies outside the BLD and close to Hambrook. “The Interim Position Statement for Housing” has been invoked in three of these applications. If approved, these “piecemeal and unplanned” applications as submitted will chip away at the strategic allocation figure and the proposed masterplanning without providing the infrastructure so badly needed in the parish. The Interim Position Statement has weight as Supplementary Planning Guidance and the Local Plan Review also has weight having reached its Regulation 19 stage, it is not clear which has precedence.

The period of greatest pressure is likely to be experienced before the approval of the Local Plan and therefore the "Chichester Interim Position Statement for Housing" should be amended to exclude Southbourne parish now.

(Please note the uploaded document "Chichester Interim Position Statement for Housing" is dated 2020 as the 2022 version does not appear to be on the CDC website)