We are required to maintain a 5 year supply of deliverable homes. This is usually based on the monitoring period of a financial year (1 April to 31 March)
We, like almost all authorities I know, do site surveys around 1 April each year and pull the information together and then update the land supply to create a trajectory and calculate the 5YS.
The new July 2018 NPPF clears up the 'mess' of the buffer which used to be dependent upon 'significant under delivery' which was not defined. The buffer now depends on the results of the Housing Delivery Test. If the HDT result is below a set % you have to apply a 20% buffer rather than the standard 5% buffer.
However, the HDT is not published until November each year. I think it is published in November, It hasn't been published yet at time of writing (28 November 2018). So I assume that although Government wants monitoring to be accurate, robust and timely, and they still require a 5YS to be in place, they are happy to wait 8 months (April to November) from the time when we have the data to be in a position where we can actually provide a 5YS output.
What do we do between April and November?
