WAVERLEY will have to find space for 4,950 new homes over the next 20 years under new plans unveiled this week.

Overall in Surrey, 47,200 new homes will have to be built by 2026 with Waverley having to build 20 per cent more every year than it currently does.

On Tuesday, Surrey County Council unveiled the latest stage of the South East Plan on the orders of the South East England Regional Authority.

It sets out how the area is going to build more houses, encourage the growth of business and develop a better infrastructure over the next 20 years.

Once adopted, it will replace the current county structure plan which runs until 2016. Until now it has only been known how many houses Surrey would have to take, following a decision by SEERA, but now the county council has divided those figures up to the 11 different districts.

At the moment, the average number of homes built in the borough every year is 205. Under the latest proposals that figure will increase by almost 20 per cent to 245 a year to accommodate 4,950 new homes in a 20-year period.

This is the equivalent of having to find room for an extra 850 homes in Waverley over and above the 4,100 which would have been built if the current house-building rate were to continue.

The county came up with the figure after asking the borough council to carry out an urban capacity study of how many homes Waverley itself thinks it can accommodate. This includes looking at sites which could potentially become "available" as a result of existing permissions, sites allocated for housing and brown field sites which could be redeveloped in the next 20 years.

Waverley's figures showed that it believes it has the potential capacity for 4,856 new homes. However, the county looked at the borough's housing list and its need for new homes in the future and rounded the figure to 4,950.

The news of the increase comes despite the fact that overall in Surrey the number of houses built every year is set to drop.

Currently an average of 2,905 homes are built in the county every year, but under the new proposals this will reduce to 2,360.

Average house building figures in nine of the county's districts are to reduce under the plans to reflect that reduction but Waverley and Guildford are being asked to take more following the results of the capacity studies.

The news was not well received at a meeting of Waverley Borough Council's executive recently where borough and county councillor David Harmer broke the news.

Portfolio holder for planning Patrick Haveron said that although an extra 40 homes a year was "not very much", it was vital that the borough council do all it can to stop Waverley being swamped with new housing.

"There is only so much capacity that Waverley can take," he said.

Waverley Borough Council has yet to formally respond to the consultation and is looking at putting together a special development control consultative forum to look in detail at the proposals.

"We need to consider how we can constructively harness any new housing investment in the area to contribute to the lives of our communities," the council's director of planning and development Steve Thwaites said.

However, local MP Jeremy Hunt is appalled by the proposals to increase house building in "rural" Waverley.

"It's totally unrealistic to expect Waverley to accommodate nearly 5,000 new houses," he said.

"The pressure all this construction will place on local services such as our roads, schools and health care will be shattering.

"What makes this plan worse is that it is based on such an ill-conceived policy.

"The government has decided that the country needs to up its house building to provide more affordable accommodation for key workers and low income families.

"The reality is that building 47,000 new houses in Surrey will do little to bring house prices down, particularly since the proportion of these homes that will specifically be social housing remains unclear.

"Increasing the supply of houses in areas such as Waverley will only succeed in driving up demand for housing in the area as more people see an opportunity of living there.

"Instead of following a policy of urbanising our countryside, the government and SEERA should concentrate on schemes such as shared purchasing and longer mortgages to put existing houses within reach."

Six weeks of public consultation on the plan starts on Monday and residents can have their say though leaflets in the county's library and local council offices.