This is a challenging period for the three counties as investors and local authorities worry about the health of town centres and the damage from the lack of new development for years kicks in.
The parameters of the problem are known, but the ability to overcome them presents a barrier, mainly through a lack of suitable finance.
Yet Ashford seems to be overcoming the problem with major commercial and residential schemes. Brighton is trying hard to find the solution and West Sussex Council is also doing its best.
However, anyone who knows the region will understand that one of the barriers to commercial schemes is the mania for building houses. By any stretch of the imagination the quality of the vast new estates being built is poor, small units and a lack of facilities such as schools and doctors’ surgeries, let alone shops or industrial space.
As we now know the foolish open season for converting office buildings into residential has not been a great success with far too much jerry building.
Are we destined to have derelict town centres and wasteland housing estates? Frankly the planners have a lot to answer for but they have a problem in a national government that could not care less about the built environment. Plenty of gestures but zero effort understanding.