After five years of preparation the new Wealden Local Plan is now dead in the water. In a damning letter (Inspectors conclusion – stage 1 of the Examination Of The Submission of the Wealden Local Plan), the like of which I have never seen, the Planning Inspector has advised Wealden District Council that it cannot take its current draft Wealden Local Plan forward to adoption and must start again.

The inspector held that, amongst other things, the council failed in its Duty to Co-operate with neighbouring councils such as Eastbourne, which cannot accommodate its unmet housing need, and placed too great an emphasis on protecting the environment through an overly precautionary approach which was not justified on any reasonable assessment of the evidence.

Prospectors ascending the Chilkoot Pass heading for the Klondike Gold Rush 1898

The council has decided to accept the Planning Inspector’s findings and withdraw the draft Local Plan which means that the council no longer has an up to date Local Plan and is significantly short of being able to demonstrate a five year housing land supply. Without a five year land supply all local policies that restrict the supply of housing are out-of-date and national policies apply instead – namely the presumption in favour of sustainable development set out in paragraph 11d of the National Planning Policy Framework.

The council now needs to get its act together and come up with an acceptable plan that does more to build houses in Wealden. In the meantime the council has lost control over where new homes are built providing they can be shown to be in a sustainable location so there is a ‘window of opportunity’ and clear potential for development sites in the district to be brought forward. Perhaps not quite a Klondike style gold rush but certainly not the result that the council was planning for.

Don’t hesitate to talk to this practice to avoid a missed opportunity in Wealden or to progress projects that were previously stopped on Ashdown Forest mitigation grounds.