The area covered by AL3 is generally suitable for housing development, having been used as a quarry and subsequently as landfill.

However, given that the policy seeks to make "provision of a high quality form of development to be masterplanned as a sustainable urban extension of Chichester City, that is well integrated with neighbouring areas on the east side of the city and to the north of the site, providing good access to the city centre and key facilities and to sustainable forms of transport", there is a very important small modification which I believe to be required.

At present, the eastern boundary of this site (alongside Drayton Lane) contains a large number of mature and semi-mature trees, along with substantial shrubs. These provide two very important benefits. First, as is noted, they provide an excellent wildlife habitat for barn owls, buzzards (five or six are regularly seen in the area between this site and Oving village, although this is not mentioned in the CDC paper), bats and water voles amongst others. Second, this strip of vegetation gives now and importantly would continue to give in the future, a strong visual break between the urban environment of the steadily growing city of Chichester to the west and the high quality agricultural land with small villages to the east.

Experience says that planning consent provisos to require developers to retain trees and hedgerows are rarely effective, so the most certain way to safeguard this vital feature is to exclude a strip of 20 to 25 metres along the eastern edge - ideally with ownership of this strip transferred to CDC or an amenity charity.

Thus, I strongly request that this strip of land is removed from site AL3, which would retain the ability to provide housing of an only slightly reduced scale, whilst providing very high environmental benefits, both to the existing local residents and to future residents of site AL3.

A strip of land 20 to 25 metres wide along the eastern edge of the site should be removed from designation AL3 in order to give the substantial environmental benefits described above.