Re: NPPF and 5-year housing land supply - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

Hi Robert. I just wanted to clarify a couple of things. I believe there is a distinction to be made between your current situation "a substantial 5YHLS shortfall" and your record of delivery. You clearly have a shortfall now, and that suggests to me that 49 applies. However, as far as 47 goes, how 'persistent' has your under-delivery been? There is no defined target here, I think common sense will need to apply. Have you, over the last 10 years, say, persistently failed to meet your annual housing target? Or is the shortfall a new phenomenon (several key sites have completed, other large sites need remediation and won't start delivering for 3-4 years, say)? If it's the latter, then you will presumably need to show the 5% buffer in your 5YHLS, not the 20%. What is perhaps of greater importance is that 49 applies to you, and "Relevant policies for the supply of housing should not be considered up-to-date if the local planning authority cannot demonstrate a five-year supply of deliverable housing sites". I don't think, therefore, that what you are assessing your supply against (5 years or 6) is as important as whether you can demonstrate you are going to meet it. You can either demonstrate a housing supply for 5 (or more) years, or you can't . What hits more is how persistently have you failed to deliver against target to date (taking what can be shown to be a reasonable amount of time to expose a trend). So: "How's your delivery been?" tells you which % in 47 applies; "How many years' supply can you demonstrate?" tells you whether or not 49 applies. My only question back to everyone is 'which target are you using, and are you happy to stand by that figure if challenged?'.

Robert If I was facing you at a s78 I would say that by definition the 5 year period begins at the start of the next monitoring period and ends + 5 years on from that point. The 5 year period then can be up to 5 years +up to 364 days them depending on when in the year you have the appeal (which always struck me as odd about that 2008 letter) and so trying to add in those extra days is an error. Remember a trajectory is two dimensional. The 5 years slides along the horizontal access, the +5% or the +20% is the vertical access and adds to number of units and not to days. I think you are committing a dimensional error in confusing completions and days, the plus 5% etc. is an addition to units not to days.

Andrew, a helpful clarification on the %, thanks. You will have to show you can deliver whatever your 5 year supply is, PLUS either 5% or 20% WITHIN the 5 years.

Andrew, I agree that what the NPPF requires is the addition of 5% or 20% extra units to the supply of deliverable housing. My argument is that by assessing our deliverable housing supply against what is effectively a 6-year housing requirement target (including adjustment for previous under-delivery since 2006), we are already implicitly factoring in a +20% buffer in measuring the scale of our housing shortfall. I hope this makes sense. (Since we don't have an up-to-date Local Plan, there is no scope for moving forward housing sites from later in the plan period.) In answer to Adam's point, the District has had a 5YHLS shortfall for the past 2 years, we've failed to meet our district housing target in 4 out of 5 years since 2006, and our 5-year shortfall now runs to several hundred dwellings even allowing for adjustment to include a windfall allowance for small sites. Obviously, it will be up to planning inspectors to interpret "persistent under delivery" but I'm assuming it would be prudent to work on the basis that we will be expected to demonstrate a 20% buffer.

Robert, I have nothing to add to what Andrew and Adam have advised, all of which I totally agree, but until your follow-up answer I was going to post the comment that if you are going to calculate the 5 year HLS in the way you are doing then it is important that you don't forget the current year. I say this because of experience elsewhere where a particular Council I shan't name uses the same method as Chichester but then ignores the current year where completions are predicted to substantially fall behind the annual requirement and as such must be accounted for when determining the 5 year HLS. As such I'm pleased to see that at Chichester you do take the current year properly into account.

Adam, thanks for highlighting the difference between supply, shortfall and persistant under-delivery. I now have a bit of a query. My authority have an agreed annual housing figure, and we have a shortfall caused by the recent market down turn - not persistant under delivery. We have looked to address this shortfall over the plan period and obviously in part within the 5 year supply. However, we are now looking at how we take into account the buffer. Should the buffer be 5% of the annual housing figure or 5% of the annual housing figure plus the figure that has been added to address the shortfall?

Hi Joanne. Good Question! I'm afraid I don't have a simple answer, certainly not at the moment. I see this as whether there is a difference between the target, and the supply. By that I mean, your target may well be a flat line, a single annual figure. However, as you point out, delivery against that target determines how many houses are still to be built. Does this mean your flat line shifts upwards with each annual shortfall against it? Or do you have evidence to show you are managing the supply, with peaks and troughs? If you have some large sites where remediation has started for example, you may be able to argue that once these are up and running, you will exceed your target for several years. I'm sure you will always be open to challenge if you are promising 'jam tomorrow' with no real certainty on delivery (and what was 'certain' to come forward in 2008 may have totally stalled here in 2012). You can't ignore the shortfall (and I'm not saying you are), but how you demonstrate you will 'catch up' over the plan period is critical to this. So I suppose you have a choice rather similar to that of choosing a mortgage. You have the 'tracker' which uses annual monitoring to annually recalculate the target for the remaining period, and your 5% (or 20%) is recalculated with it. Or, you have the 'fixed rate' which says your annual target won't change, and therefore your buffer % is fixed as well. I suspect if you choose the latter, you may well have to have some pretty robust evidence to support your case that there are higher numbers on the way. Does anyone have any recent decisions which support either of the above approaches? I'm not sure we'll be in a position in the future of being able to say 'no more housing for the year thanks, we've met our target'. (Before anyone says anything, I am aware that there have been places where they have applied a 'moratorium on housing' - although I don't know how those places are doing now in terms of delivery). Any ideas?

Adam, I understand the logic of what you are saying, but for some localities, especially those in designated growth points where the RSS had envisaged stepped increases in supply during what has turned out to be the recession, this will prove to be impossible within a 5 (or even 10) year period. In this area we were fairly close to RSS delivery 2001-06, but 5,000 behind 2001-2011. A step change occurred just as the recession bit. A further step increase was shown from 2011, but we are still in recession. New phases of existing sites, and sites which have planning permission are simply not coming forward. We cannot see any way of getting back even to 2001-2006 levels until 2016/17, let alone making up the backlog. Our Pre-Submission Core Strategy recognises and evidences this position, and I think the only option we have is to forget the RSS and re-start with our evidence base. Any thoughts?

Just on the issue of 5 or 6 years. Not sure whether everyone does this but don't you make an estimate for delivery for the current year and then take that off your overall residual requirement (usually the RSS but now in doubt because of imminent revocation). Then you have reduced the amount of housing you need to deliver estimating what will be provided in the current year. Then you calculate your 5 year requirement from the residual and this needs to be provided from the 5 year period starting April 1 after the current monitoring year. So technically you are only counting 5 year supply. Does that make sense? I think the 5% or 20% extra requirement in the NPPF is just unclear and confusing. There is no definition of what 'persistent underdelivery' is. This makes it a matter of judgement, unclear and unhelpful. Although I agree that persistent under delivery is different to 'current shortfall', the latter could be a result of the former. David, I think that your position is awkward because of the stage you are at in Plan preparation. We made the decision that the RSS will imminently be revoked and that we need to reassess our long term housing requirements and set a locally derived requirement. We are doing this across out HMA. This would be that same as what you call your 'only option'. This would then alow you to evidence and justtify a new requirement to be set in your CS/LP. It's all a bit confusing!

Jonathan, Sorry, I should have made myself clearer. We have an extensive evidence base which supports a lower housing figure as set out in our Pre-Submission Core Strategy. The reality is that our housing trajectory for the period up to 2026, based on the lower figure in our CS is broadly equivalent to the high RSS figures. This will be extremely challenging, without the burden of having to make up the shortfall that will exist (against RSS) by recovery in 2016 at the earliest. Hence my comment that this is the only option we have.

David, none of the questions I pose in this reply are aimed at you, per se, so don't assume I am asking you directly here. Let's say you get to 2016 and have been using your new core strategy figure to inform your housing target, (since 2013 for sake of argument). Let's say you have shown under-delivery in each year since 2006 (or whenever you started to dip below the RSS figure). What's your 5 year HLS looking like at the moment (2012)? How will it look in 2016? How will the presumption in favour of sustainable development (if applicable) affect you? How comprehensive is your SHLAA? How many sites are likely to come forward which have not been identified in the SHLAA (never mind if they've been allocated or not)? How will your plan stand up to a more 'random' phasing of housing, rather than the one you had been 'expecting' in your 5 year HLS? Isn't this where the work you've done on your evidence base comes in handy? Ditto the flexibility in your policies? How will your strategy respond to the change? If we take the presumption at its word, we surely can't be expecting outlandish schemes in ridiculous and unpredictable locations to come forward. What about other policies that seek to balance housing with economic and environmental considerations? If a green field site (which always was suitable for housing) comes forward in advance of a brownfield site, so what? I mean that question literally, not flippantly. What will the impact be on the rest of your strategy? If it is seriously harmful, would you not have enough reason for refusal? How do you read paragraph 14 of the NPPF? On one of Jonathan's points, I'm glad you've raised the issue of looking at housing across the HMA. This is really important, particularly in the light of the duty to cooperate. This is all just me thinking out loud. What do others think?

Robert (see first post sent 13 Apr 2012) refers to CLG's letter dated 20 August 2008 sent to Chief Planning Officers stating that the 5 year period should be a “forward look” from the start of the next monitoring period i.e. for AMR 2012 the monitoring period should be 2013-2018. Has this CLG directive been deleted? I cannot find this letter on their new website – is it up to us to adopt our own approach i.e. from the start of the current monitoring period (2012-2017) or should we continue with the forward look (i.e. 2013-2018)? The letter is not mentioned in the Lord Taylor's recommendations of the review of government planning guidance...