A BUSINESS organisation is calling on Wycombe District Council to ensure that adequate land is made available for commercial and industrial development to allow businesses to set up, expand or move into the area.

The demands follow a report earlier in the year from business information company Dun & Bradstreet, which showed High Wycombe was the sixth most profitable of 162 towns and cities surveyed in Britain. The town has 25 per cent of jobs in banking, insurance and finance and an unemployment rate of under 1.5 per cent.

Chris Cope, chairman of the Wycombe Area Committee at the Thames Valley Chamber of Commerce & Industry, believes far too much former industrial land is lost each year to new housing.

For instance, he said, last year the loss of industrial land was no less than 18.5 acres, the equivalent of nine substantial commercial sites.

"Wycombe cannot continue in this way. The Chamber of Commerce urges Wycombe District Council to ensure that sufficient land is made available every year for industrial and commercial development in the Wycombe area," he said.

Statistics from Wycombe District Council show that over the 1990s the district generally lost up to 205,000 sq ft of industrial floor space per year. The space lost is recorded after the buildings have been demolished.

In the year from April 1998 to April 1999 the figure jumped to 750,000 sq ft, mainly due to the demolition of the former G Plan and Parker Knoll factories in High Wycombe and St John's Industrial Estate in Penn.

Almost all of that land has gone to housing, although one exception was the building of the Safeway superstore.

Both the Bucks Free Press group and Ercol Furniture recently submitted applications to the district council with proposals to build housing on their present sites in Gomm Road and Spring Gardens respectively.

Ian Fletcher, a principal policy officer in the planning department at the district council said the changing role of industry in the area had seen an increase in office development which has led to a more efficient use of land.

He added: "In 1999/2000 we only built one house on a greenfield site. All the rest were on brownfield sites, ahead of Government policy to develop brownfield sites.

"There are a lot of reasons why we do not need so much land for industry. Employment densities are rising, leading to more efficient use of land by office development rather than manufacturing and the working age population of the district is falling."

Clive Brocklehurst, of commercial agents Aitchison Raffety in High Wycombe, said demand from the service and technology sector for offices in the town is very high.

He said: "They want high-quality offices and the letting during construction of all the new office buildings in High Wycombe over the last two years demonstrates the town's renaissance as a commercial location, moving away from its old industrial base."

He said while new development was not as land hungry as it is built over more storeys, the loss of commercial land cannot continue as the area is restricted by Green Belt and regional economic policies in its ability to allocate new land for development.

"The council has strict policies to protect the remaining employment-allocated land, which they will have to stick to or the Chamber's fear may be realised."