VOTE: Arun District Council gets warning as homes target is slashed

The council voted overwhelmingly to set its annual housebuilding rate for the next 17 years at 400 homes per annum, well below the previous government-imposed target for Arun.

Ricky Bower, the council’s cabinet member for planning, said Arun had listened to what residents had had to say at a series of consultation meetings on its future housing and employment plans and had based the figure on what people had called for.

“This is localism at work,” he told Thursday’s full council meeting.

Mr Bower said the previous approach, based on the premise that the local economy would be boosted by further housebuilding, had been discredited, and in future providing employment opportunities would be the priority.

But the new, lower housebuilding target, cut even further from the figure of 425 agreed by a committee just two weeks earlier, was strongly criticised by Labour and Liberal Democrat members, with the exception of Lib-Dem group leader Simon McDougall.

Roger Nash, leader of the Labour group, said he was “flabbergasted” by the figure being proposed. The target of 400 homes a year would go no way towards solving Arun’s housing crisis, he claimed, and represented an attack on people who were in desperate need of decent housing.

“We have a duty as councillors to stand up for what is right and what is wrong and what is wrong is to cut the number of houses built in Arun each year.

“What is right is to provide decent housing for the people already living in the district and for those who want to come and live here.”

Mr Nash said Mr Bower’s proposal for the 400 homes a year target flew in the face of the advice of assistant director of planning and housing strategy Karl Roberts, who had warned the committee two weeks earlier that a figure of 425 homes per annum would create a “significant risk” that Arun’s overall plan would be found “unsound” by the government.

Mr Roberts’s professional opinion was that the committee should opt for a figure of 495 homes being built each year. If the plan was judged to be unsound, the council would have to start the whole process of drawing up its Local Development Framework plan all over again.

Littlehampton Beach ward Liberal Democrat councillor Dr James Walsh said the proposal for lower housebuilding rates was based on the “nimby” feedback from the consultation, when more a more reliable guide to public opinion, the council’s “Wavelength” panel, showed strong support for a higher figure.

However, Dr Walsh’s amendment calling for the 495 figure favoured by Mr Roberts was heavily defeated.