A five-week examination begins today of South-East England’s housing, transport and development agenda until 2016.
Described as Britain’s most important planning inquiry for a generation, a panel appointed by deputy prime minister John Prescott will decide how the South-East will cope with an expected population and economic boom.
The panel will consider draft regional planning guidance prepared by Serplan, the conference of South-East local authorities. It will tackle housing, urban regeneration, traffic growth and woodland development.
The guidance affects Oxfordshire, Berkshire, Buckinghamshire, Bedfordshire, Hertfordshire, Essex, Hampshire, the Isle of Wight, Surrey, West and East Sussex and Kent. London is covered but its housing will be dealt with on a different time-scale.
There are huge areas of controversy with developers and environmentalists at loggerheads over the future of England’s most prosperous region. Housing is the major battlefield, and proposals for 900,000 new homes outside London and 600,000 in the capital will be attacked and embraced on either side of the ideological divide.
Serplan has also drafted measures aimed at levelling the economic imbalance in the region, where western areas, for example the M4/M40 corridor in London, Surrey and Hampshire, are outstripping slower-growing eastern and coastal regions.
PLS News 18/5/99
