Core Strategy Preferred Options document - Amazon Web Services

Characteristics, Issues and Opportunities
infilling and intensification existing settlements can sustain without their
character being adversely affected.
The development of additional housing will have the potential to deliver
affordable housing to meet the current shortfall, in order to supply housing for
local community need. This will only happen, however, if planning policies are
in place to ensure a proportion of the housing developed is affordable.
The release of land for housing provides an opportunity to ensure that
infrastructure is developed alongside it that benefits residents of both existing
dwellings and those that will be developed. Planning obligations and the
community infrastructure levy provide a mechanism to ensure that the
required infrastructure accompanies all new development.
Economy
Rochford has a small, but reasonably productive, and enterprising economy.
Although the District does not record significant levels of ‘high skills’, a solid
foundation of basic and intermediate skills underpins the local economy, and
supports a healthy share of knowledge-driven jobs.
Rochford District is a generally prosperous part of the country, despite only a
modest share of resident ‘knowledge workers’, the typically higher paid
employees. This is reflected in reasonably low deprivation, excellent health
conditions among the District’s population (although some pockets of poorer
health in the more urban areas are evident), and one of the lowest crime rates
in the country.
Issues and Opportunities
The small economic scale, modest levels of high skills and local competition
may be undermining the sustainability of the Rochford economy; resulting in
Rochford ranked within the lowest quartile of local districts by its economic
change score.
In addition, data at the ward level shows some evidence of an economic
divide between urban and rural areas; this is particularly noticeable in levels of
skills, where wards close to the coast have significantly lower levels of skills
than wards close to the town centres.
The economy of the District is dominated by the service sector with over
three-quarters of those employed in the District working in this sector. This is,
however, a smaller proportion than that of either the region or the country.
Although the District is predominantly rural, the proportion of local businesses
involved in agricultural activities is low, constituting a fraction over 3% of VAT
registered businesses in Rochford District compared to national and regional
figures of a fraction over 5% and over 5.5%, respectively.
16