18th November 2022

For those of us who have been looking at the Mid Sussex District Council District Plan Review documents and wondering how to assess its main priority, to provide housing where there is need, Karen Dunn’s report on 17 November “ Approval to build 24 new flats in town” gives absolute clarity on how MSDC defines need and how to deal with it. It is simply to ignore it and let the developers get on with the task of making big profits , with a relatively tiny compensation amount to be paid by them for this evasion of responsibilities.

How else to regard the statement that “While both the Haywards heath Neighbourhood Plan and the Mid Sussex District Plan require 30 per cent of all new homes to be regarded as affordable, the applicant said that would have made the scheme non-viable. Instead a provision of £47, 769 for the provision of affordable housing elsewhere was agreed”. In this case that would have been 8 homes out of a total of 24. So the cost of building it somewhere, anywhere else than prime land close to the centre of town is set at just under £6000 per unit in compensation. A bargain for developers and the Council can wash its hands and plead that they were simply following rules.

The cost of building a new home would certainly not be less than £100,000 probably rather higher, so that only needs about 20 “designated social housing units” from the District Plan to be overturned on behalf of developers pleading poverty for 1 actual case of need to be met, somewhere, probably on an estate with poor transport links.

Meanwhile the nature of real need in Haywards Heath, as elsewhere in Mid Sussex, is that young people without the means to afford getting a foot on a housing ladder whose lowest rungs are steadily rising away from reach will continue to be driven to pay inflated market rents on a property let privately. And these private landlords will continue to be significant customers for newly developed flats, keeping prices high and ensuring that developers have “viable schemes”.

Mid Sussex Labour believes that our housing market is broken, ruined by years of this kind of artificial ring-fencing in favour of the developers profits and the easy fix for planners that evades the wishes of residents. We need to break this ever-inflationary spiral of house prices and the best way to do that is to provide homes for all kinds of tenures and in locations where the community as a whole will benefit from the development.