I am not against building houses. Social housing in Rother is only around 10% of the stock, house prices here are more than 12 times local earnings, and young families are leaving because they cannot afford to stay. We need homes, and I want to see them built.
But building houses and building communities are not the same thing, and the infrastructure here is already failing in ways that are measured and published. Last year the treatment works at Iden, the village I live in, discharged into the River Rother for 840 hours. That is 35 days. The overflow on Military Road added another 255 hours, and Rye's own works at Harbour Road added 177. Across Hastings and Rye there were 501 discharges totalling more than 2,100 hours across 27 sites, and monitoring was incomplete at some of them, so the true figure may be worse. Southern Water is already struggling here and the organisation is at breaking point across the South East. The draft Local Plan now proposes 791 more homes in this same sub-area, and nobody has yet shown me how that system copes.
It is not only the sewers. Rother's own Infrastructure Delivery Plan says this plan "will place increased pressure on both the strategic and local road network", that several junctions on the A259 are already congestion hotspots and that rural bus coverage is limited outside peak hours. It also says road improvements should be phased in line with housing development. I agree with that completely. I want it written in as a condition rather than left as an aspiration.
Then there are the doctors, the dentists and the school places. As the county councillor I am the one who has to find those school places, so I am entitled to ask what the evidence base actually says about capacity across health and education.
To be fair to Rother, it is proposing around half what the Government's formula demands, and it is doing so because 83% of the district is a protected National Landscape and much of the rest is flood plain or heritage. My argument is not about the total. It is about the order things are done in.
We should be thinking at a much bigger scale than "we need some houses". Get the water, the sewers, the surgeries, the schools and the roads right and the housing follows. Do it the other way round and you store up 20 years of problems for the very people who move in. The consultation closes on 24 November and I would urge every resident to respond.
By: Cllr. Dan Bradley, Rother District Council
