Housing targets, NPPF and the Thames Valley

Nev Surtees, an associate director in the Savills central planning team, considers the implications of the draft NPPF on housing delivery targets in the Thames Valley.

Since the Government launched its consultation on its planning reforms, we are bound to be thinking about what the final housing requirements will be for the districts in which we work.

Current estimates suggest that we’ll know for sure by the end of this year.

The Government has published tables as part of the consultation and it’s clear that the new standard method for calculating local need could result in significant increases to housing targets in some authority areas. To plan for higher levels of growth will require tough choices, and for some authorities, require the development of Green (or Grey) Belt sites.

When adopting its housing targets, the Government will need to give careful consideration to the responses it receives to its consultation. However, it seems unlikely that Labour will dilute its election pledge to deliver 300,000 new homes a year.

An extract from its ‘outcome of the proposed revised method’ table is shown below, including authorities for the local area and a comparison in the numbers identified by the current and proposed standard method requirements.

There are some significant increases proposed for most authorities and only two authorities show a reduction. Authorities with the largest proposed increases in housing need requirements are Buckinghamshire, South Oxfordshire and Wiltshire.

The Government’s transitional arrangements, which explain how practitioners should move from the previous to the new policy, will have a major bearing on how quickly the changes – including to the housing numbers – will come into effect. Much will depend on an authority having a sufficiently advanced plan. If they don’t, housing requirements will need to be revised.

Savills research reveals that around 60 local planning authorities (LPAs) have sufficiently advanced Local Plans to continue as they are, and around 15 LPAs would be required to revise their plans (unless they speed up their submission).

The 53 per cent of LPAs that are not at examination and or Regulation 19 stage, and do not have an up-to-date Local Plan, will be required to take on board the new standard method immediately for their new emerging plans.

The proposed transitional arrangements, in our view, strike a sound and pragmatic balance between the twin objectives of full Local Plan coverage and the step-change needed in housing delivery. It would do more harm than good for authorities to abandon well-progressed emerging Local Plans and to start afresh.

There are also practical realities which would make a faster transition challenging, such as the availability of Local Plan inspectors at PINS, upon whom a sudden surge in Local Plan examinations would place an unmanageable amount of pressure.

There is also the small matter of how the local authorities are going to react to the changes. Given the magnitude of the proposed new standard method outputs, there will undoubtedly be a good deal of head scratching taking place within local authorities over the next few weeks.

Some will take the changes in their stride, others will positively welcome the opportunity to deliver more homes, but there are many authorities who, having become accustomed to the lower output of the current standard method, will feel very uncomfortable about the scale of the challenge which lies ahead for them.

The Government, however, has been very clear about what it expects – housing delivery is a top priority, and our local authorities are expected to make the tough decisions needed to support it.

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