Mid Sussex District Update July 2025

This report covers planning developments in Mid Sussex District during the first half of 2025, and CPRE Sussex activity to promote its countryside and villages in what our District Plan calls ‘a rural district ….. a desirable place to live, benefiting from a high standard of living and a superb and easily accessible natural setting, and consistently ranked highly on quality of life measures.’

It has been a challenging six months, as will be apparent from what we say below.

Mid Sussex new District Plan:  The biggest news is the apparently imminent collapse of the District Council’s efforts to bring our District’s strategic plan up to date, efforts that have been ongoing since 2021.  As we write it looks highly likely that the Planning Inspectorate, which is tasked with assessing the soundness of the proposed new District Plan against a set of standard criteria, will report to the Council that they need to withdraw their draft plan, and start again.  They have concluded that the Council has failed the test of adequately co-operating with its neighbouring authorities in Crawley and Horsham by failing in its draft Plan to identify how many homes Mid Sussex can supply to meet their respective housing shortfalls in addition to Mid Sussex’s own needs.

Absent an unlikely last minute climb-down by the Planning Inspectorate, the Council will be required to withdraw their draft plan and re-write it, a process that may delay the replacement of the District’s current, but already two years out of date, 2018 Plan by a further three years or so.  The Council is threatening to take the Government to court over this; but that sounds to us like a long-shot ploy, and does nothing to progress matters in the meantime.

Whilst we share the Council’s view that the Planning Inspectorate has been both unduly slow and pedantic in its approach to the Plan’s examination, at the end of the day a failure by a planning authority to copper-bottom its documentation to demonstrate that it has co-operated with its neighbouring authorities is one of the most basic mistakes that one can make in the whole plan-making system.

And those of you with long memories may recall that this is the second time in a row that our District Council has had to withdraw a draft Plan from examination for breach of the duty to co-operate rule.  The same thing happened to the Council a decade ago to the first version of what eventually became to 2018 District Plan.  Lessons were not learned.

So neither the Planning Inspectorate nor the Council come out from this debacle smelling of roses.  We residents are the losers in this sorry tale. And it brings the planning system into disrepute without advancing the cause of solving the housing crisis.

And meanwhile, the Council’s ability to determine where the most appropriate locations are for new development, and to stop inappropriate development in unsustainable locations, is significantly curtailed because its 2018 Plan is out of date and it cannot demonstrate that it is delivering enough homes to meet its current Government-imposed target (1,356 homes a year) or sufficient Plan-allocated sites to build them on.  This is a problem that is liable to last for some years in the absence of a new adopted District Plan.

All of which makes more difficult our job of campaigning successfully to ensure the extra homes (especially affordable and social homes) we need in the District are built in genuinely sustainable locations and of the most needed type (the right homes in the right places).  That’s a challenge we are up for!

Lindfield:  To give you a taste of that challenge, take the case of a 90 home development outside of Lindfield on what locals and we thought was an unsustainable spot well outside the village boundary.  The developers, Gladman, anxious to exploit the weakness in the Council’s planning defences and its failure to determine their planning application for the site within six weeks, appealed to the Planning Inspectorate to grant them permission.  The Council did not even bother to argue against Gladman’s application, leaving the good people of Lindfield in the lurch.  A very disappointing outcome, albeit hardly surprising when the Council gave up.

Balcome (yet again): Also a bit disappointing, albeit nothing to do with the District Council, was the decision of the Court of Appeal in April to uphold a decision of the Planning Inspectorate to overturn a decision by West Sussex County Council to refuse permission to Angus Energy to permit further test drilling for oil within the High Weald at Balcombe (yes, that never ending saga).  It does not follow from that Angus will be allowed to operate their site if their testing does identify a commercially worthwhile reserve.  Different planning considerations would then be at stake. CPRE Sussex was not involved in this court case, but will continue to monitor developments.

Bad proposals in the pipeline, Ansty (“Cuckstye”) and Haywards Heath:  The real test of whether the Council has steel in its spine, or has been cowed by its Plan withdrawal experience, will come in the coming weeks when it considers whether to approve two housing developments, one for 1,450 homes on agricultural land between Cuckfield and the village of Ansty (the long running “Cuckstye” saga) and the other for 80 houses on an environmentally very rich site in a designated green corridor protecting the south eastern edge of Haywards Heath.

In both cases CPRE Sussex has been working alongside local residents to fight the developers’ proposals, in the case of Cuckstye for well over two years.  These are two classic examples of development being promoted in completely the wrong place.  There are many (and different) grounds why these two development schemes are completely inappropriate, perhaps the most obvious of which is the fact that you cannot have sustainable development in the middle of nowhere, leaving residents and visitors almost entirely dependant on their cars to do their shopping, reach the nearest facilities, schools and train station.  The district may need more homes, but they have to be built in the right place – a fact that national planning rules expressly claim to support.  These sites would definitely not be the right places.

The Council has a long list of other small and medium sized sites that it has deemed to be sustainable for new development – enough to meet its housing target.  It should be encouraging developers to bring these sites forward, and saying no to building in these two unsustainable locations.  It will inevitably involve them in an appeal fight.  It is a fight that we believe they should be able to win if they are sufficiently determined to stand by their strategic and environmental priorities for the good of our rural district.  Along with the local communities at risk, we will be watching the outcome closely.

Bolney:  And to end on a positive note, we congratulate three plucky and persistent musketeers from Bolney who have won a seven year battle to close down a noisy and unsightly unauthorised waste recycling operation just off the A23, but within the High Weald, after they persuaded the Council’s Planning Enforcement team to take decisive action to bring the breach of planning rules to an end.  We applaud both those residents and the Council for their achievement.

Solar power: We also need to give our national CPRE office a special pat on the back for their success in getting the Government to announce in June that all nearly all new housing developments will have to include rooftop solar panels: www.cpresussex.org.uk/news/rooftop-revolution-is-a-win-for-cpre/ The Government estimates that this could save a typical houseowner £530 a year. CPRE has been promoting rooftop solar for a long time in order to promote energy efficiency in homebuilding, and to minimise the need for ground based solar panel farms in the open countryside.  This is a direct and important win for CPRE campaigning, albeit that we want to see the Government extend their scheme to commercial and industrial buildings, car parks and beyond.

Like it or not, we are going to have to accept quite a lot of ground based solar if we are to meet national targets for meeting rapidly increasing demands for electricity whilst cutting out our dependence on fossil fuels.  This is an issue of particular significance in sunny Sussex which is going to be bear quite a load of the required new solar arrays; so the more solar we can elevate to rooftops, the more agricultural and open land we secure for their traditional values.

We are developing guidelines that will feed off CPRE’s national guidelines and steer our approach to assessing the pros and cons of individual new ground based solar array schemes across the county.

Our strength and influence as an organisation depends vitally on the support that we receive from you, our members.  As ever, we thank you for that support.  We will hope to see many of you at the Knepp Estate on Saturday, 6 September for CPRE Sussex’s Countryside Day that we are hosting for its second year. If you were interested in volunteering to help out on the day, we would welcome you with open arms: please contact our CPRE Sussex office at  info@cpresussex.org.uk or at 01825 890 975.