By Press Release
Last night the Isle of Wight Council’s Cabinet voted to restrict second home ownership, look into more homes in Newport and renew emphasis on brownfield, rather than greenfield development.
Most of the changes were recommended by the Isle of Wight Council’s scrutiny body to change the draft Island Planning Strategy (DIPS) the Island’s planning blueprint.
The amended document will go to the full council on September 21 for approval, before it is submitted to government for their assessment.
The plan, once approved, will include policies developers have to abide by and earmark priority housing sites.
The current strategy the Isle of Wight Council uses is out of date and means the authority is penalised by the ’tilted balance’, which favours development unless there is something majorly wrong.
Calls by Conservative Group leader, Joe Robertson, for the cabinet to throw out proposals to build 360 new homes in Bembridge and Freshwater, partly on the grounds that high property prices in the area meant that they could not be ‘affordable’ for Islanders were not heeded. Fellow Tory, Peter Spink, who said that the approval of the document should be delayed because the new Prime Minister, Liz Truss, may change the law as early as November, were also not supported, as there will be at least a six-week delay after the full council meeting while a further consultation is carried out.
It was believed that, if the amendments were refused Conservative councillors would vote against the DIPS en bloc, delaying the process, which started in 2016, even further. However, Cllr Robertson has confirmed to the IW Observer that his group would have a free vote and a number of them are believed to have already told him that they will not support the removal of the allocation for Freshwater and his own ward of Bembridge.
The need to adopt the planning strategy has been highlighted by multiple councillors, including many in the former Conservative administration, as well as the Local Government Association (LGA) in a recent peer review. The LGA said the authority needed to urgently finalise and adopt the strategy because without one it was possible developments could happen that are “deemed not in the public interest and outside the needs of local people”.
