Hampshire County Council's representations on the draft South East Plan

Amount of development

(i)The amount of housebuilding proposed for the Districts within Hampshire County Council's area is the maximum that could be accepted by the public in terms of the impact on quality of life, due in large part to concerns over infrastructure provision.

(ii) Support the statement in the draft Plan that local authorities should adopt a `Plan, Monitor, Manage' approach to housing provision - this must mean phasing the release of land for housebuilding to match planned requirements and prioritising the development of brownfield sites in preference to greenfield land.

(iii) The figure proposed in the draft South East Plan of 795 new homes per year in Basingstoke town and environs be accepted for the period up to 2016, but that thereafter the figure should be should be 370 to recognise the current waste water treatment constraint. This figure to be reviewed at the first review of the South East Plan taking account of the conclusions of a waste water study which will be then have been completed.

(iv) The housebuilding and employment land provision figures proposed in the draft South East Plan for South Hampshire be accepted for the period up to 2016. Thereafter the figure should be amended to reduce housebuilding provision by 7,000 and employment land provision by 100,000 square metres of floorspace.

(v) Support for the target that 35% of all housebuilding region-wide should be affordable housing, but that this challenging target will not be achieved, especially in rural areas, unless local authorities are able to set lower thresholds and more ambitious quotas for affordable housing on development sites. It will also require increased Government funding for affordable housing schemes. The draft Plan needs to spell this out and thus give support to local planning authorities in making the changes.

infrastructure provision

(i) Support for the thrust of draft policy CC5 on infrastructure provision, and in particular its statements that the scale and pace of development must be conditional on infrastructure provision and funding, and that development shall not proceed until the relevant planning authorities are satisfied that the necessary infrastructure to serve the development is available or will be provided in time.

(ii) This support is conditional on acceptance that the term `infrastructure' is defined as including the full range of facilities required for a sustainable community, including green space (landscaping, amenity open space, recreational areas, and land for nature conservation) and not just `hard infrastructure' such as roads, transport and utilities.

(iii) This support is subject to the inclusion in the draft Implementation Plan of refined and more comprehensive information in infrastructure requirements which the County Council is collating from infrastructure providers.

(iv) Call for infrastructure funds to be established and managed through existing arrangements and joint working below regional level, in contrast to the proposal in the draft Plan for there to be a regional infrastructure fund only. The former would be more sensitive to locally determined infrastructure funding priorities and have greater democratic accountability.

(v) Support in principle for the proposed transport delivery agency for South Hampshire which would be based upon the existing Solent Transport partnerships and which would have the responsibility and necessary powers to manage and integrate public and private transport.

Achieving sustainable development and protecting quality of life:

(i) Object to draft waste policy W3 on regional self-sufficiency insofar as it relates to new proposals for the apportionment of 2.2 million tonnes of London's waste for landfilling in Hampshire. Such proposals are contrary to Hampshire's `core' minerals and waste planning strategy and there are insufficient suitable sites in the right location and with sustainable transport access to meet this requirement.

(ii) Seek amendments to the policy for Areas of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONBs) to remove the erroneous distinction made by SEERA's draft Plan between AONBs and National Parks and which thus, wrongly, downgrades the value of AONBs.

(iii) Support for the draft policies which seek more sustainable resource use, sustainable construction, achieving a net gain in biodiversity across the Region, and ensuring that new development is well-designed and is concentrated within existing urban areas.

(iv) Support for the draft policy SH14 which, inter alia, proposes that new commercial and residential buildings in South Hampshire should achieve the Ecohomes/BREEAM `very good' standard for emissions, energy use, water efficiency and use of recycled materials, and from 2012 should achieve the `excellent' standard. However, the draft Plan's region-wide policies - which would apply to the rest of Hampshire - set less stringent standards; for sustainability and consistency reasons, the proposed region-wide standards should be raised to match those proposed for South Hampshire.

(v) Support the region-wide policy CC10b which enables Local Development Documents to designate Strategic Gaps to prevent the coalescence of settlements which are larger than 10,000 population. This would enable the designation, for example, of the Blackwater Valley as a Strategic Gap in order to ensure that Farnborough and Camberley retain their separate identities, and the similar designation of land between Fleet and Aldershot/Farnborough.

(vi) Support the policy SH3 which identifies the location of Strategic Gaps in South Hampshire in line with region-wide policy CC10b, and seek the addition of gaps between Romsey and Southampton and Southampton and Havant and Rowlands Castle.

(vii) Support the draft policy (CC12) which seeks to enhance the character, distinctiveness and sense of place of settlements, but seek amendments to strengthen it and secure its implementation, by requiring local planning authorities to undertake landscape and townscape character assessments.

(viii) Call for wide publicity to be given to the completion this autumn of the Appropriate Assessment of the draft Plan and for time to be allowed for interested parties to make comments. The Appropriate Assessment - a statutorily required assessment of the impact of the draft Plan on sites of European importance for nature conservation - ought to have been available during the current consultation period. However, it is not likely to be published until this autumn just before the start of the Examination-in-Public. It may therefore be necessary to adjourn the EiP to allow sufficient time for interested parties to make further representations or to revise those already submitted to take account of the new information.

(ix) Call for the policy on flooding to recognise that allowing development in flood plains should not be policy. The Council accepts that there may be exceptional circumstances in which it may be justified to allow development in areas at risk from flooding, but this should not be written into policy.

(x) Call for the definition of Market Towns to be in step with the definition of between 2,000 to 20,000 population used elsewhere by central government, rather than the 3,000 to 10,000 proposed.