WAVERLEY will have no trouble accommodating around 2,800 new homes by 2016, but ensuring that 40 per cent of them are affordable could prove tricky.

That is the verdict of Waverley Borough Council following Surrey County Council's decision to adopt its structure plan.

As reported bin last week's Herald, the county council has approved the plan which will help to shape future development in Surrey over the next decade.

The plan states that Waverley must accommodate 2,810 new homes from now until 2016 while Surrey overall must find room for almost 36,000 after being handed the target figure by the government.

The local planning authority, Waverley Borough Council, which has the job of determining planning applications, has told The Herald that it believes it will not be too difficult to accommodate the large number of new homes.

The development control and policy manager, John Anderson, said that the council discussed the number of homes proposed in the structure plan last November and decided against lodging an objection.

This is largely due to the result of an urban capacity study which showed that the extra homes could be placed in the borough. The council also only adopted its development blueprint for the borough, the local plan, in 2002, which identified sites for housing.

"We believe that the number of homes will be reasonably easy to accommodate and we have allocated additional land for it," he said.

With only one site in Milford and one site on the end of Farnham allocated for large number of homes in the local plan, it is expected that lots of smaller developments scattered throughout Waverley's more urban areas will make up the vast majority of the 2,810 new homes.

However, this could create problems when it comes to ensuring that 40 per cent of all new homes are affordable.

This is because many of the smaller developments are for too few homes to require it to include an element of affordable housing.

On top of this, it has become increasingly difficult for the council to secure cash from the Housing Corporation to pay for developments of affordable housing. This is as a result of changes to the way grants to pay for affordable housing are allocated.

Mr Anderson told The Herald that officers were concerned that the combination of these factors would made it increasingly difficult to meet the affordable housing targets because developers will not be obliged to provide land for them and the council will find it cannot get the cash to build them.