Planning Policies

The WCN site is allocated in the adopted Winchester Local Plan as a reserve 'Major Development Area' to accommodate 2,000 new homes and a range of community facilities.

CALA believes that the WCN site should come forward in order to address Winchester's acute problems of a lack of affordable housing, and to help meet the Government's objectives of social cohesion, inclusion and the sustainable delivery of new homes.

PPS3 - Housing, published in November 2006, formalises the Government's requirement for greater delivery of new housing in response to housing need. CALA's proposals for WCN are fully in accordance with the guidance set out in PPS3, as well as other recent government planning guidance including PPS 1 - Delivering Sustainable Development.

An earlier planning application to develop the WCN site was dismissed on appeal in February 2006 before many of the recent changes to national planning policy. However, the Secretary of State's decision acknowledged that Government policy was undergoing major changes to ensure the right amount of housing could be delivered in the right place at the right time.

He also stated clearly that the scale of Winchester's affordable housing crisis could not be ignored.

For a copy of the Secretary of State's decision click here. (PDF: 628kb)

The draft South East Plan, recently subject to an Examination in Public (EiP), proposes that most housing development in Hampshire should be directed to sub-regional areas centred on Portsmouth/Southampton and Basingstoke.

CALA argued at the EiP that Winchester and the other central Hampshire districts would be unable to address their own affordable housing needs and that a more realistic distribution of housing numbers was needed in order to address imbalances in Winchester's housing market.

Click here ( PDF: 556kb) for a copy of CALA's written statement to the EiP. The Panel report is due to be published in July 2007.