Five-year housing land supply position statement (as at 01 April 2023)

The Council's approach to calculating the housing requirement, which the five-year housing land supply will be measured against, involves the following stages:

• determining the base housing requirement
• assessing the scale of any past underdelivery or overdelivery
• determining an appropriate housing supply buffer
• calculating the five-year housing land supply requirement

Determining the base housing requirement

The planning practice guidance (PPG) is clear that housing requirement figures identified in strategic housing policies should be used for calculating the five-year housing land supply where a plan was adopted in the last five years (see PPG paragraph 005 (opens new window)), otherwise the housing requirement will need to be measured against the area's local housing need (LHN), calculated using the 'standard method'.

The Council's strategic housing policies are included in the adopted development plan which comprises the Local Plan Part 1 (Core Strategy) (opens new window) and Local Plan Part 2 (opens new window). The Local Plan Part 2 is the most recently adopted plan (09 December 2021) and amends the Core Strategy housing target through Policy UCS3 (opens new window). This policy readjusted the overall housing requirement down to 5,303 dwellings (previously 7,140 dwellings) over the plan period (2013 to 2030), setting an annualised housing requirement (between 2019 to 2030) at 363 per year. For the purposes of this position statement, the base housing requirement is taken as 363 per year.

Assessing the scale of any past underdelivery or overdelivery

Paragraph 31 of the PPG (opens new window) states that any shortfall against a housing target in an adopted plan should be added to the plan's housing requirement over the next five years. Alternatively, where areas deliver more completions than required, the additional supply can be used to offset any shortfall against requirements from previous years.

Policy UCS3 (opens new window) sets the plan's housing target base date from April 2019, therefore only delivery between the years 2019-2020, 2020-21, 2021-22 and 2022-23 needs to be considered to identify any potential shortfall. To date (April 2019 to March 2023), 1,520 dwellings have been completed against a requirement of 1,452 resulting in a surplus of 68 dwellings accrued since April 2019. This 'overdelivery' has been deducted from the plan's requirement over the next five years.

Determining an appropriate housing supply buffer

The National Planning Policy Framework (2021) (opens new window) (Paragraph 70) requires local planning authorities to apply an additional buffer of 5%, 10% or 20% to ensure choice and competition, or where there has been a significant underdelivery of housing, as measured against the Housing Delivery Test (HDT).

The Government has delayed publishing the results of the 2022 HDT (opens new window) pending the revision of the NPPF. In this absence, the Council has calculated its own housing delivery over the preceding three years (2019-20, 2020-21, 2021-22) which amounts to 1,136 completions against a requirement of 1,089, or 104%. This is beyond the 85% threshold whereby an automatic 20% buffer is applied through national policy; therefore, the Council is only required by national policy to apply a 5% buffer to the housing requirement.

Calculating the five-year housing land supply requirement

The five-year housing land supply requirement is therefore calculated as being 1,834 new homes between April 2023 and March 2028. This is inclusive of the required 5% housing buffer. This calculation is set out in Table 1 below: