Planning and Development – Development Issues
Housing Targets
Spelthorne has been given a target of 3220 net additional housing units to be completed by 2026: this equates to 166 per year. Not satisfied with this very aggressive, imposed target, the Tory-controlled Council has set out in its plan to build over 3,300, with a bias to delivering these early rather than spread evenly across the 20 years.
The housing targets have come from the South-East region acting under government guidelines and are actually lower than the original targets set by Surrey (172 units per year). This process does not have much democratic legitimacy and in no way reflects the views of local residents. Despite this local Liberal Democrats are critical of the poor way Spelthorne is responding to the challenge - the volume and speed of development could be better reflect local residents needs.
What angers Liberal Democrats is that Spelthorne's Tories refuse to take steps to defend the borough. An example of this is the failure to respond to changed government policy for car parking in new developments. The government published changes to the rules in November 2006 and these came into force in April 2007. It is now possible to insist on a minimum level of car parking in new developments to overcome the problem of clogging up the surrounding road network. Spelthorne's Tories have refused to implement this change.