Tuesday 16 December 2014

Planning By Numbers

There are 117 towns and civil parishes in Suffolk Coastal district. and Framlingham is one of those. 

Nobody will deny that the number of houses in the district must increase in forthcoming years to cope with population growth and the council has worked hard to prepare forecasts on just how many new homes will be needed to cope with demand. 






This report , which is the result of that work can be viewed on the council's website by clicking this link.

It is a thorough, comprehensive and lengthy document and covers fifteen years from 2013. Within it is the following table:- 


This table indicates that the Suffolk Coastal region will need 7,560 new homes in total or 500 every year between 2014 and 2028 to meet forecast demand.

The last census reported a population of 124,600 in Suffolk Coastal. Framlingham's population was in the region of 3,100. This means that Framlingham represents around 2.5% of the region. If the entire district grew at an equal rate to accommodate the new homes needed Framlingham would need 189 new properties - between now and 2028. 

This should put into perspective the applications that are currently in the pipeline to build 400 new homes in Framlingham in the immediate future. This number of new houses is completely out of line with the district's requirements and, even if Framlingham had double its fair share of new homes it would be fourteen years before we needed the quantity under consideration.

Developers are possibly  targeting Framlingham due to its status as one of the country's best places to live in the Country Life and The Sunday Times' surveys - that will look good on sales literature. But building on this scale would soon destroy any possibility of Fram continuing to score highly in surveys of this type.

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