The arrival of an email from the Deputy Prime Minister addressed to me a couple of weeks ago certainly came as a bit of a shock.

In it, the Deputy Prime Minister announced that our local plan, known as our Island Plan, would have to use a standard method for calculating our future house building targets.

This standard method meant that our Island Plan housing number target would rise from around 475 homes a year to just over 1,100 homes a year.

Read more: New Isle of Wight homes number could double under government plans

If you have been following the Island Plan saga you will know that a number of councillors have worked tirelessly to delay the process by any means they could find and in the face of warnings from myself and others that a new Government might force housing numbers upon us have now placed the Island at severe risk of excessive house building numbers or face sanctions if we do not, or cannot, build them.

All this was avoidable had we submitted the Island Plan two years ago, as was foreseen, until those councillors' actions derailed the process leaving us now under the new Government rules and intentions and having to find a much higher number of house builds every year.

The very thing those councillors tried to prevent is now the very thing they have managed to deliver.

I am convinced that this Island cannot provide for 1,100 homes every year and I have written back to the Deputy Prime Minister detailing why we cannot achieve those numbers and why we believe we have properly evidenced the lower number of 475 houses a year.

It is worth noting that over the past ten years the Island has only built, on average, 347 houses each year.

We do not have the capacity or strength of skills based on the Island to build these kinds of numbers of houses and we know that the build costs are so far away from affordability for Islanders that we are simply not solving our problem of housing need.

We know infrastructure is desperately needed to even support 470 homes a year and the money to improve all of that simply does not exist.

I am disappointed in the actions of short-sighted councillors that have now created such a problem for us, but I am determined to try to argue down the numbers with Government and I can confirm we are pressing ahead with submitting our draft Island Plan in September.

Let us hope we can convince the Planning Inspector that our number of 475 is the right one, and not the standard method of 1,100. That simply will not work for our Island.