Fantastic article in the County Times by Andrew Bardot, Southwater resident.
Protect our communities
Water Neutrality, a term unheard of before 2021, is a fundamental fact of life impacting on every resident within Sussex North Water Resource Zone (SNWRZ), extending from Crawley through Horsham, Billingshurst, Pulborough and to Chichester.
And this week we had a very stark reminder of the real scale of the problems faced by all the local districts when the water supply is turned off within the SNWRZ.
The plain and simple face is that there has been and continues to be maasive over development in West Sussex, largely driven by three factors:
(i) by a misguided government desire to stimulate uneeeded growth in the South East rather than in other regions of the country which need and would benefit from economic and social growth.
(ii) by the housebuilding sector, a major-donor to the political parties and which generates huge profits from building in the south east.
(iii) by the speculative land owners/investors who acquire viable rural land and seek to generate huge profits from selling this for development.
The SNWRZ is already the most water stressed region in the country. SRS has said it many times, our district does not need and cannot sustain this development.
We challenged the Tory plans in their draft updated District plan to licence further large scale development around Southwater, they listened and withdrew their plan.
It remains to be seen how their recently elected Lib Dem successors, who in their pre campaign encouragingly openly attacked the Tory housing plan and vowed to protect green spaces, will tackle this vital challenge.
Our communities look to and place trust in our newly elected representatives to recognise the rapid destruction of our district through over-development and to act decisively to protect the future of our communities.
Andrew Bardot, Save Rural Southwater.
Two Mile Ash road, Southwater
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