He goes on to urge people to engage with the consultation process with East Devon District Council. 

He’s right but here’s how got into this mess.

It’s pure coincidence that last week Owl drew attention, once again, to the role played by Karime Hassan in facilitating the “build, build, build” strategy of the Tory EDDC administrations from 2005 to their collapse in 2020 – see Revolving Doors.

Owl remembers Paul Diviani, alongside the faithful Philip Skinner, as the architect and driving force behind this strategy. It resulted in the current Local Plan having a development target of 950 houses/year, based on an aggressive “jobs led policy on” scenario.  Where studies showed only around 580 houses/year would be required to satisfy purely demographic and normal migration growth trends. 

This is an uplift of 370 or 64% on what is strictly necessary and is the target that the current EDDC coalition has inherited and the basis on which the government thinks reasonable to set its own growth strategy.

On infrastructure, especially provision of sewage treatment, the problem local authorities have is that, although they are the planning authority, they can’t successfully defend an appeal against planning rejection unless supported by the Environment Agency (e.g. phosphate levels in the Axe) or South West Water.

SWW rarely claim they can’t put in the required resources – indeed promised new capacity for Cranbrook.

David Reed MP  text of facebook post six days ago

I am not against home building. Of course we need more homes for the next generation so that they can live near their friends, family and work.

However, we have built at scale in #ExmouthandExeterEast without proper, joined up thinking around infrastructure and the usage of local services.

The fact that people in Cranbrook are only just getting a supermarket, after years of campaigning, is shameful.

We must not put local people in this position again, so please do engage with the consultation process with East Devon District Council.

From my perspective, if new infrastructure and local services are not baked into the planning from the start, I will be strongly pushing back against this proposal.