WAVERLEY has come under fire from the planning inspector for failing to make the case in its Draft Local Plan for freeing up green belt land for development.

No date has been set yet for the public inquiry to decide if Waverley’s blueprint for future development can be adopted, but the government inspector Jonathan Bore has already asked for answers from Waverley to 14 challenging questions.

A key area of concern raised is Waverley’s lack of supporting evidence to underpin proposals to release green belt land to help meet its housing target to build just under 10,000 new homes by 2032.

“The Green Belt Review and Topic Paper are concerned principally with site identification, and on their own they do not amount to the exceptional circumstances required to justify altering the Green Belt boundary,” he wrote. “Where is the work demonstrating that exceptional circumstances exist for the release of land from the Green Belt?

“This would require a clear connection to be made between specific alterations to the Green Belt and specific amounts of development land to be brought forward to meet housing need, and also a convincing analysis that all or part of this land cannot be found outside the Green Belt.”

The inspector is also critical of Waverley’s decision to deal with proposals to remove protective landscape designations, such as Areas of Great Landscape Value (AGLV), in its “non-strategic” Local Plan Part 2, which will be submitted for examination at a later date.

“There are many designations seeking to protect landscape and openness,” he wrote. “AGLV was originally established at county level and is extensive, so it is a strategic designation.

“The Farnham/Aldershot Strategic Gap and the Area of Strategic Visual Importance are strategic designations. Issues regarding these strategic designations have all been deferred to the non-strategic Part 2 Plan. Why hasn’t Part 1 of the Plan dealt with these designations and created a straightforward and clearly understood approach that is clearly linked to the National Planning Policy Framework objective of protecting and enhancing valued landscapes?”

More pre-inquiry questions to test the soundness of Waverley’s Local Plan are expected and the council said it would agree a timescale for its responses with the inspector and publish them on its website when they had been submitted. The date for the hearing will be published six weeks in advance.

“I don’t detect from this first set of questions anything that suggests that  the Inspector thinks that the draft plan is fundamentally flawed,” Waverley Friends of the Earth planning spokesman Kathy Smyth said. “I think some of the questions will be difficult for Waverley to answer to the Inspector’s satisfaction so we should expect to see changes made to the draft plan to meet these concerns.”

Farnham Society planning committee chairman David Howell said: “I am concerned by the questions posed by Inspector Jonathan Bore on the Local Plan Part 1 but it is not unusual for an Inspector to question the contents of an emerging Local Plan robustly. I very much hope that Waverley will undertake the suggested redrafting of wording and have the evidence that he will be asking for when examined at hearing sessions which we hope will take place without too much delay. The Farnham Society would like to see the emerging Local Plan succeed and be adopted as soon  as possible.”