Wealden, along with Brighton and Hove, has had its target upped. The district council is now expected to achieve 11,000 new homes in 20 years instead of 8,000.

This suggests a massive spread of development eating up the countryside, but campaigners against such an idea might be saved - by the credit crunch and the threat of recession.

The construction industry is traditionally one of the first to start making cuts when the economy goes into decline – a knock-on effect of a drop in housing prices and people having less money to spend.

Taylor Wimpey is making 900 redundancies, Persimmon 1,000 and Redrow 550. These are three of the biggest housing developers in the country and it is clear others will follow suit.

This puts two huge developments in the Hailsham area in doubt or at least on hold – Persimmon's Hellingly Hospital plan and Taylor Wimpey's blueprint for Welbury and Woodholm farms.

With the banks cracking down on lending, mortgages becoming more difficult to arrange and an ever-increasing rate of inflation, the number of buyers in the housing market is falling rapidly.

So the bottom line is the government can set targets all it likes – if the developers won't build the required number of houses due to economic constraints, the targets will remain unfulfilled.

And it's becoming increasingly unlikely that Labour will win the next General Election, so by the time the developers get round to building the houses they have permission for, government policy may well have changed.