NPPF: Meaning of Persistent Under Delivery - Public forum - Planning Advisory Service (PAS)

Not a big deal in my view logically it can only have one literal meaning. Literal Meaning It doesn’t say chronic or acute - that’s import, all dictionary definitions of chronic refer to constant over some some period and include recurrent events within the definition. The dictionary definitions of persistence all refer to heading back from the present by a period of time or (unhelpfully) defining it as an indeterminate period of time. The degree of undershoot doesn’t come into it as it does not say ‘acute and persistent’ so it is only the time dimension not the scale dimension in terms of the literal meaning of the word. Again because it does not say chronic, and consistency is part of the dictionary definitions of persistency. to me it has to be a continuous record of under delivery. How Far Back? – think about it logically, if two years ago you had underdelivery, and then underdelivery had persisted into the next year. It had persisted than by definition it was persistent so you only have to go back two years. So what if the underdelivery was negative in years -1, not -2, -3 etc. That would be chronic underdelivery as it is recurring. What if positive in years -1, -2, but negative before that. That would be neither persistent or chronic by their literal meaning. Of course if underlivery recurred in year +1 it would be chronic, and in year +2 as well both persistent and chronic. We can’t tell if something is persistent unless we have more than one years continuous evidence, it might simply be an outlier year and their is no evidence to say otherwise. So logically it has to mean underdelivery, by any degree, over two or more continuous years in the past till now. But what is now? Ok we are in the current accounting period. We all know at DCLG instruction that trajectories are measured from the first day of the next accounting period forward. You can’t include the current period as it would require some forecasting till the end of the year and the concept of persistency is about past events not forecast forward ones. So logically it is the two accounting years before the current one. Finally how do you measure ‘underdelivery’. The concept of delivery is of houses built, not projected supply at those points. So it has to refer to whether units completed for that year were below the target for that year. How do you measure that target for a past year? – PPS3 or NPPF. There is no text in the NPPF suggesting it be cast restrospectively in terms of calculating housing supply, so in my opinion it would be PPS3 in the 2011-2012 and 2010-211 years and NPPF in the 2012-2013 year forwards. This also makes it very easy to calculate- just look at the AMR. Past arguments over 5 year supply are irrelevant what matters is whether the houses needed to be completed in a year were or not. This to my mind is the logical literal meaning of the NPPF. If DCLG consider that it means something different, some complicated fuzzy assessment of both acuteness and persistency of delivery over some longer period of time, they should state so in guidance or used more precise terms in the NPPF, otherwise no one will be able to construct a forward looking trajectory and the required level of new housing to meet trajectory unambiguously.