From Dene Francis, Northwood:

With the proposal to build 9,615 new homes on the IW by 2035, the 217-page draft Island Plan is currently open for public consultation.

The housing element of the plan is enormous in its scope, hugely destructive in its delivery by erasing large areas of open countryside, worryingly thin on details when it comes to the social and infrastructure apparatus required for such an expansion, and most of it seems directed in support of national house building policy rather than local need.

Average occupancy figures for homes in England taken from the last national census held in 2011, indicate the Island Plan will see the population on the IW rise by 23,076 or 16.5 per cent by 2035.

That is 1.5 times more people than the current population of Newport.

But according to the IW council’s own figures from October 2017, the Island’s population grew by 403 to 139,798 between 2015 and 2017 — 0.145 per cent per year.

The Island Plan builds enough houses to accommodate a population rise of 1.1 per cent per year up to 2035. Based on those figures, the Island Plan will over deliver on housing against the Island’s population growth by 87 per cent annually. But as this is a 15-year plan the figure will eventually be 1,305 per cent.

Things change, but they would have to change a great deal to bring the over provision figure down to something less eye watering.