8.5

There is no research led justification for this allocation, local need is met by available housing & the Market Garden site FC1 more than meets the local requirements for affordable housing, this is a case of offloading people from other areas. The practice is unsuitable for their needs & indeed can be detrimental to their
physiological, physical & emotional well-being as well as causing further financial hardship. The rush to build houses anywhere at any cost actually has a greater human cost, people need to have affordable housing close to family friends social connections, transport & employment.

This policy is forcing people towards car based living, with little useful connection to public transport or realistic opportunities for safe cycling.

Don't rush to comply blindly with government policies, make positive & effective challenges & put people before policies.

The NPPF makes it clear that we should be building places that engender healthy lifestyles and that we should encourage active travel. We are supposed to be building for a low carbon future. We are supposed to build around sustainable transport. Many of the places we have seen take us in exactly the opposite direction on all counts.

The car-based nature of many new developments we saw engendered US type life-styles, although in America the homes themselves are at least large with land surrounding them. With limited or even absent public transport, teenagers need lifts for many activities and have little independence in terms of going out. Older people who can't drive or parents at home with young children are stuck as there is little to do locally. We saw places that had hardly a soul walking during our visit. Even if you can afford the home, the question is: can you afford two cars and the expense
We need to use geographical and economic analysis in deciding where to build rather than leaving it to a system of arbitrary targets. The current methodology for calculating targets for new homes for each local authority is based on continuing past housing trajectories rather than informed and data driven analysis including the
transport needs of an expanding population. The current system ends up targeting rural or semi rural areas which mean hundreds of new car-based estates. Planners are under fantastic pressure to accept large sites offered by developers for the mandatory 'five year housing supply' and Local Plans assimilate these without
putting down a funded public transport system or cycle network to pin everything together. Fields of houses often end up as car-based estates without much else to offer.