Horsham fears on housing allayed

Reassurances that new areas of land will not be earmarked for development in Horsham District have come from Paul Rowley, Horsham District's head of strategic and community planning.

His comments follow misleading reports in another newspaper, which suggested that Horsham town would have to take an extra 1,240 more homes than anticipated.

Mr Rowley told the WSG this week: "We published our preferred option for the Local Development Framework in February, which took us to 2016, but we always said that development would not stop then.

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"We were working on ten years, but since then the Government has made it clear that the ten year period must run from adoption of the plan. Ours will be adopted in late 2007, which means our ten year period is until 2018 and not 2016 as originally believed," he said.

He added: "We are not identifying new areas for development or going beyond the river. It is effectively an extra two years, but we have always said there would be more housing to come. It will simply continue at the same rate in Horsham district as a whole, using land aready identified for development and brownfield sites where possible."

Full story in West Sussex Gazette August 11.