WAVERLEY Borough Council 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 to 14 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.

Mr Bore wrote: “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. Where is the work demonstrating exceptional circumstances exist for the release of land from the Green Belt?

The inspector is also critical of WBC’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 two, which will be submitted for examination at a later date.

“AGLV was originally established at county level and is extensive, so it is a strategic designation,” he wrote.

“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 two plan.

“Why hasn’t part one of the plan dealt with these designations and created a straightforward and clearly understood approach clearly linked to the National Planning Policy Framework objective of protecting and enhancing valued landscapes?”

More 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.

Waverley Friends of the Earth planning spokesman Kathy Smyth said: “I don’t detect from this first set of questions, anything that suggests the inspector thinks the draft plan is fundamentally flawed.

“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.”