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Sign petition asking local election candidates to support our countryside
Sussex voters will head to the polls on 7 May for local elections, including those for West and East Sussex County Councils. The future of Sussex hangs in the balance – in increasingly uncertain times, these elections are our opportunity to stand up for the kind of future we want to see.
Will it be a future in which young people can:
- Afford to live in the places and communities that they grew up in?
- Have a voice in shaping the neighbourhoods where they live, work and play?
- Take their own families for beautiful walks with unspoiled views to the South Downs, the High Weald or other glorious Sussex green spaces?
- Hear a skylark sing or sit beneath an ancient oak?
- Experience a climate where heatwaves and flooding are not getting ever-more extreme?
- Have plenty of water for their homes, and rivers and seas free from sewage spills?
This is the future that we want for Sussex. With huge changes to how local government is organised over coming months, we need councillors who will champion the policies to make this a reality – at borough, district and county levels, and in the unitary authorities to come.
We want the Sussex countryside to not only survive, but thrive.
Sign our petition:
Our petition calls on local election candidates to pledge support for the countryside and commit to the following:
• Support councils, housing associations and community land trusts to deliver genuinely affordable homes, especially for social rent.
• Build on brownfield first, through working with district and borough councils to prioritise the over 1,200 acres of brownfield land in Sussex for new development.
• Resist central government control on planning policy and push back on their sledgehammer housing targets, in partnership with district and borough councils.
• Protect valuable landscapes and habitats, and invest in nature recovery across Sussex.
• Champion a community-led clean energy movement through supporting local groups.
• Hold the water companies to account, and use planning conditions to ensure that new developments can only be built if there is enough capacity in the sewerage system to handle them.
Sign this petition to demand that council candidates make this pledge — for Sussex, for nature, and for future generations.
Go to A greener Sussex for us all – ask our council candidates!
