So, we have an extraordinary council meeting tomorrow night to deal with the very difficult situation regarding future development. Basically:
Under the Labour Government, the District Council had to find sites for someone to build 250 new homes per year, and it came up with a scheme.
Lib Dems and the Rochford Residents felt some of the sites in the scheme were poorly-chosen, but lost the votes on this.
The new government said that councils could now set their own targets. So the District Council came up with a new rate of 190 new homes per year. But they increased the number of years in the plan so the sites people didn’t like were still included.
It now seems that the old figure still applies until the government’s Localism Bill becomes law in December.
The District Council wanted to sidestep this by asking the Government Inspector to suspend her examination of the plan until December.
However the inspector has politely refused to do so, leaving the council with a problem…..
You can download the full agenda from here.
The options now seem to be -to revert to the earlier ‘250 homes per year’ council scheme, with a uncertain possibilty to reduce the numbers later, or withdraw the plan, and let developers come up with their own schemes for up to 250 new homes per year.
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This situation was entirely foreseeable and accurately predicted by Cllr Mason. But can anyone advise the position regarding the consultation which ended on 30 April LAST YEAR and is still unprocessed?
Sadly, still no sign of it being discussed. At last full council it was effectively dismissed as being unimportant.
What an absolute mess. The Council could have avoided all this if they had listened to sense, probably about 2 years ago!