CPRE Sussex Director’s column written for West Sussex Gazette, June 2024

With the upcoming election now just weeks away we at CPRE Sussex have been busy ensuring climate, nature and affordable housing are at the forefront of candidates’ minds.

At the start of June, we published our election manifesto asking potential MPs to commit to actions and policies which will tackle climate breakdown, protect nature and make genuinely affordable housing a reality.

We want to see candidates and parties that commit to renewable energy sources and ending reliance on fossil fuels. We need politicians who oppose road and airport expansion, including Gatwick’s additional runway plans, and will support Sussex to adapt to the unavoidable impacts of climate change.

We want to see support for nature-friendly farming and properly funded, protected National Landscapes, including the South Downs National Park, and Nature Recovery Networks.

To help tackle the housing crisis, we need changes in policy including an increased requirement for affordable housing in developments and abolishing ‘hope value’ to help local authorities build social housing. We need to back communities to use neighbourhood planning or rural exception sites to deliver small-scale affordable housing developments. We need to take the house price pressure off the South East with a regional economic development strategy for England.

These changes need to be supported by intelligent planning which ensure the right development in the right places, while protecting the things that make Sussex special. We need planning reform and a land use strategy that promotes brownfield development first, abolishes the Standard Method for setting housing targets, puts local voices at its heart, and supports nature recovery, such as hedgerow planting.

As well as publishing our manifesto, CPRE Sussex has also been joining others in the call for action to tackle climate change ahead of the election.

Our Chairman, Prof Dan Osborn, Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences, University College London, has signed a joint letter calling on party leaders to take ambitious action for climate change.

The letter, signed by more than 400 members of the climate change research community, calls for policies that accelerate action to cut greenhouse gas emissions and to increase resilience to those impacts of climate change that cannot now be avoided.

We have also launched an online tool which allows anyone living in Sussex to easily find all their local candidates and write one letter on key climate and nature issues which can be sent to all of them.

Sussex is on the frontline of the cost of living, housing, nature and climate crises. We need our next MPs to champion policies that address these huge challenges. In the coming weeks we will continue to call on all candidates to back the countryside.

Read more about the CPRE Sussex manifesto at: cpresussex.org.uk/get-involved/cpre-sussex-election-manifesto-planning-for-climate-nature-affordability.

Read the joint letter to party leaders at: cpresussex.org.uk/news/uk-scientists-call-on-party-leaders-for-ambitious-action-on-climate-change.

Contact your local candidates using our online tool here: actionnetwork.org/letters/general-election-2024-contact-your-candidates