Nicholas Soames’s response to the announcement by the developers’ consortium that the planned strategic development of 2,500 homes and a relief road in East Grinstead is no longer financially viable;

“This welcome news has certainly not come as a great surprise even before the current economic downturn with its very serious attendant consequences. The infrastructure costs per house were already almost unaffordable.

We now have a chance to start with a reasonably clean sheet of paper and the opportunity to create a development with proper infrastructure that is sustainable and appropriate to the surrounding area.

We do need more housing; not a surgery goes by without several people coming to see me worried that their children will not be able to live near them. Whatever transpires it must be, as I have always maintained, provided with proper infrastructure and in every way sustainable for the area.

The situation in East Grinstead backs up a recent report by the Environmental Audit Select Committee; “Greener Homes for the future? An environmental analysis of the Government’s house-building plans”. This influential All Party Committee recommends ‘that the Government urgently reviews the assumptions on which the 3 million homes target was based and whether it is still justified on the basis of the latest economic growth projections’.

-ends-

Notes to Editors:-

Select Committee Report:

Click here