New population growth projections indicate housebuilding targets for Lewes are “off the scale”.

Newly published UK population growth projections from government agency the Office of National Statistics (ONS) indicate that Lewes District Council’s annual housebuilding targets - set by the government - are almost double the numbers actually needed.

We are urging Lewes District Council (LDC) to press the pause button on planning decisions which impact on new greenfield development proposals, until a realistic figure for local housing targets is established based on accurate population growth projections.

In 2014, the ONS forecast that the UK population would grow to 75.5 million by 2040. But new 2020-based projections show this has dropped to 70.8 million.

In Lewes, current Parish Neighbourhood Plans and LDC’s most recently agreed Local Plan are based on providing 345 additional dwellings a year to meet expected local population growth and housing need. But the government now expects 782 new houses a year to be built in the district, calculated using a complicated ‘standardised formula’ based on the outdated ONS 2014 population growth projections.

These impossibly high targets are completely off the scale, especially as the new projections show a general decline in the country’s population growth overall.  If it falls at the same rate in Lewes, which is very likely, housing need would drop from 782 to 401 additional houses a year. If you then take off what is called the ‘affordability factor,’ which is applied in the standardised formula to calculate annual house-building targets, the need would drop even further – down to just 286 houses a year. This makes Eton’s greedy plans for a 3,000-plus new town at East Chiltington even more gratuitous.

We’d like to see Lewes District Council put all new greenfield development on hold until further clarification is received from central government in the light of these new population growth projections. Pressing ahead with greenfield development when we know it may not be needed, would be a grave and irreversible mistake - and one which would not only further decimate our dwindling rural environment, but let down the generations to come who are relying on us to do the right thing.    

We wrote to housing secretary Michael Gove towards the end of last year asking him to scrap the flawed housing calculations being imposed on local authorities and will be inviting Lewes District Council and Maria Caulfield, our MP, to join us in lobbying him again in the light of the new figures. It would be a tragedy if we lost more of our green spaces simply because of a mis-calculation.