Agenda item

Councillor Martin Wale submitted the following questions under Procedure Rule 10:

Whilst I’m sure all members were delighted to learn that SSDC now has a six year supply of housing to satisfy the needs of the Local Plan could an explanation by given for the following questions-

1.    When was the new supply of housing found to be at its current level?

2.    During the recent Members Planning Workshops, and as late as mid October, members were being informed that the calculation was between 4.2 and 4.5 years of supply. Can the Council explain how the new 6 year became available in less than two months?

3.    If the 6 year supply is now correct how many applications have been allowed, mainly on the lack of 5 year housing supply, which could have been refused as not being acceptable under the Current Local Plan.

4.    Would the fact that we didn’t have a 5 year housing supply have weakened our bid for a ‘Stronger Somerset’?

Councillor Tony Lock, as Portfolio Holder for Protecting Core Services responded:

1.      The new housing supply was not finalised and calculated until the beginning of November. Members were informed via the November Planning Briefing and the report published on 5^th November. A further briefing was held at the Housing Portfolio Holder Meeting on 13^th November.

2.      The planning policy team have been busy undertaking the large sites survey and following up with developers and agents to ensure the trajectories for housing delivery relating to permitted housing schemes are as realistic as possible.

It is important for us to be able to demonstrate that our information is as robust as possible to avoid challenge at appeal. We are aware that once we have a five year supply, the information within our report will be scrutinised in detail. Therefore we only released this information once we were sure of the data. Furthermore, a more cautious approach was taken for those applications that only have outline permission, due to the fact that the phosphates issue will mean that any with Reserved Matters will need to undertake an Appropriate Assessment.

The supply could not be accurately calculated and confirmed until all the necessary details had been verified and this is when it was released. 

3.      One of the key reasons that we can now demonstrate a five year land supply, is that the adopted Local Plan is now over five years old (March 2020) and therefore we now use the Government’s ‘standard method’ to calculate the five year supply. The Strategic Planning team worked hard to deliver the report by the beginning of November, and it was published at a similar time to last year’s report.

Due to the COVID crisis some staff were redeployed to support urgent front line work earlier in the year. It has therefore been challenging to progress with this work, alongside other critical issues such as responding to the Planning White Paper. There have been many reasons why planning applications have been refused (and of course many approved) and without going through each application manually it is not possible to give you an exact number that were refused solely due to a lack of a 5 year housing land supply. 

4.      No. This is totally unrelated to Stronger Somerset – we undertake the 5 year Housing Land Supply Assessment once a year and it is unlikely that the 5 year housing supply would have any bearing on the Secretary of State’s decision on the future of local government in Somerset. However, clearly in terms of the aims of Stronger Somerset it is a positive that we now have a 6 year housing land supply.

Councillor Martin Wale responded to ask if there had been a new form of calculation applied in the last year which had resulted in the 6 year housing land supply or had the calculation been made under the old method?   He felt the Council may have been aware they had a 5 year housing land supply earlier in the year.

Councillor Tony Lock advised that he felt there was a new method of calculating but he would ask officers to confirm this. 

Subsequent to the meeting the Specialist for Strategic Planning confirmed the main reason the Council had gone from 4.5 years supply to 6 years supply was because when we calculated the supply this year our Local Plan was more than 5 years old, so that means we had to use the standard method as the basis of the calculation. The standard method approach takes account of past under delivery (though an affordability ratio) which means that the backlog from the beginning of the Local Plan period in 2006 did not have to be carried forward in the calculation when previously it had to be.  Also like last year because of our Housing Delivery Test result we were able to apply a 5% buffer.

The report is updated once a year and it cannot be completed until the Council have all the relevant monitoring data.