A Portsmouth City Council officer has described the government’s decision to reject redevelopment plans for Tipner West as “just silly”.
During a recent cabinet meeting, councillors discussed the government’s March ruling, which blocked the council’s proposal to transform the north-west corner of Portsea Island.
The scheme included at least 800 homes, a marine employment hub, and new sea defences. However, ministers concluded that the public benefits did not outweigh the ecological harm the development would cause.
Lucy Howard, the council’s head of planning policy, told the meeting – “through gritted teeth” – that while the decision was disappointing, its timing had at least allowed the council to avoid wasting time and money before submitting its local plan.
“On the negative side it wasn’t the decision we wanted and on the really negative side it refers to the wrong regulations, it doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t provide reasons for the opinion,” she said.
The government’s letter argued that sea defences at Tipner West were not “central to the allocation rationale” and instead framed them as a “critical precursor” to the marine employment hub. Howard dismissed this claim as “just silly” and described the letter overall as “garbled” and “difficult to understand”.
She added: “Development is the only way you will get sea defences in Tipner because it doesn’t meet the requirements for funding that the Southsea and North Portsea schemes had.”
The council has since begun legal action, issuing a Pre-Action Protocol letter to the government — the first formal step in seeking a judicial review. It argues that the Secretary of State applied the wrong legal test, failed to give adequate reasons for rejecting the plans, and based the decision on flawed reasoning that ignored critical evidence.
Council leader Councillor Steve Pitt said: “What we can’t do is fund something that is unfundable, so something has to be viable on that bit of land in order to go into the local plan timetable.
“The scheme that we wanted to put forward – was the most viable scheme and that others added tens of millions of pounds of extra cost that would make the scheme undeliverable.”
He added that if a clearly unviable proposal is included in the local plan, it will be rejected by the planning inspectorate — and dismissed the idea that the council could simply “cook up something lovely when it’s absolutely undeliverable”.
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