Five year housing land supply
We are required to maintain a five-year advance supply of land for housebuilding, updated annually. These are the most recent calculations as at March 2017:
| a | Core Strategy and Urban Core Plan (CSUCP) requirement 2016-21 plus 20% buffer (see note 3) | 3672 |
| b | Requirement minus 2010-17 net undersupply | 3778 |
| c | Calculated supply 2017-22 from 2017 Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment (including allocations and unexpired permissions assessed as deliverable) | 7666 |
| d | Calculated supply plus assumed windfall (see note 1) | 7791 |
| e | Total supply as a percentage = 7791/3778 = | 206.2% |
| f | Total supply in years | 10.3 years |
Notes
(1) Previously, a windfall assumption (described as "conservative") of 50 dwellings per annum has been included. The figure included here has been reduced to 25 per year, to take account of the availability of up-to-date information from the 2017 Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment (SHLAA) contributing to the supply in row (c) and the reduction in the minimum site size from five or more dwellings in the previous SHLAA to 3 or more dwellings in the 2017 SHLAA.
(2) In contrast to the method used in some earlier years, no explicit allowance is made for bringing empty homes back into use, as the Core Strategy and Urban Core Plan (CSUCP) requirement already takes account of an assumption about reducing the vacancy rate by bringing empty homes back into use.
(3) Whilst the Council cannot be said to have persistently (that is, in every or nearly every year) under-delivered against its CSUCP requirement (as opposed to the former Unitary Development Plan requirement) over the period 2010-2017, there has been a net under-delivery by 106 dwellings in the period. In this borderline situation, the decision has been taken to exercise caution by applying the 20% buffer rather than the 5% buffer.
The Core Strategy requirement for 2016-21 (row (a) above) is calculated by annualising the five-year net provision totals in CSUCP policy CS10. The calculated supply (row (c) above) is much higher than that shown in the Trajectory in the 2017 SHLAA. This is because the calculated supply includes all sites found suitable and deliverable, even though in practice many of them will be delivered beyond the first five years.
