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Interim report on Mid Sussex District Plan calls for a 40% housing requirement increase

On 20th February 2017, a Local Plan Inspector issued his interim findings on housing requirements for the emerging Mid Sussex District Plan.

In short, the housing requirement for Mid Sussex has been increased by a massive 40% and the Council are now going to have to find many more development sites.

What is the District Plan?

The District Plan will be the main planning document used by the Mid Sussex District Council when considering planning applications. It will cover the period up to 2031 and will include the planning strategy, proposed level of development and a wide range of planning policies.

Full Objectively Assessed Housing Need (OAN) will increase by 20%:

In his interim findings, the Inspector identified that the approach used to assess market uplift and the OAN was out of date, and that the latest affordability ratio places Mid Sussex as the 22nd least affordable local authority in England outside London.

Therefore the Inspector did not consider the submitted plan to be sound and identified that a significant uplift will need to be made to the OAN:

“I consider that the full objectively assessed need for housing is 876 dwellings per annum (dpa), an uplift of 146 dpa (20%) over the base OAN figure of 730 dpa and 122 dpa over the Council’s currently suggested full OAN”

Mid Sussex to take on 150 homes a year from Crawley’s need:

Given that Mid Sussex is immediately adjacent to Crawley, and within the same Housing Market Area (HMA), the Inspector identified that:  

“Mid Sussex is the only authority other than Horsham that can make a significant contribution towards accommodating Crawley’s unmet housing need… the Mid Sussex District Plan should therefore include a contribution of 150 dpa to meet this need.”

In his conclusions, the Inspector noted that his revised figures would lead to:

… a minimum housing requirement for the plan period of 1,026 dpa, or 17,442 dwellings over the 17 year life of the plan.”

In total this will lead to a 40.5% increase over the original OAN figures.

What next?

In order for Mid Sussex to make their plan sound and respond to this sizeable increase in OAN, further sites will need to be identified for development. As part of this, the Inspector specifically stressed the importance of smaller sites in helping to bring forward housing delivery.  

The Inspector’s proposed action points for the Council included:

  • further work to identify sites or broad areas of land for potential development;
  • the self-imposed threshold for strategic sites to be lowered significantly to help with the identification of sites, and to enable a range of sites of different sizes to come forward at different times. (This will support the promotion of smaller sites and will limit exposure to delivery issues that can arise from the identification of only two or three very large sites, a subject which is particularly relevant to 5 year housing land supply);
  • more consideration should be given to the potential for new freestanding developments as opposed to settlement extensions and sites rejected by the SHLAA process should be looked at again;
  • the spatial strategy should be clarified by establishing the approximate number of dwellings expected in each settlement / groups of settlements.  As submitted, the District Plan is not sound because it provides inadequate guidance to neighbourhood plans and to the future Site Allocations Plan on the amount of housing development they should aim to accommodate. To date, neighbourhood plans have been produced without the knowledge of the OAN and housing requirement, leaving them vulnerable to being at variance with the District Plan’s spatial strategy and being found unsound themselves;
  • the 5 year housing land supply will need to be calculated against the minimum housing requirement of 1,026 dpa once the site and land identification process has been undertaken.

There will be a further meeting on 3rd March to discuss the implications of the Inspector’s interim findings on housing delivery and the steps that will need to be undertaken before the District Plan can be found sound.  

We anticipate that it will be many months before adoption of the District Plan and therefore Mid Sussex will not have a 5 year housing land supply for the foreseeable future.

What does this mean for developers?

Mid Sussex needs to dramatically increase its number of deliverable sites for housing.  If you have land which can help with housing delivery, or if your site was previously ignored during the SHLAA process, then now is the time to submit your application for development.

The key to success will be to demonstrate that the site constitutes sustainable development and supports the development needs of the area.

We specialise in promoting land into Local and Development plans and assist our developer clients in a number of ways; from undertaking detailed site assessments through to Council representations  and planning applications for development.  

We are an experienced team when it comes to new housing and you can read more about our projects here: New Homes and Development

You can read the Inspector’s letter here: Mid Sussex District Plan 2014-2031, Housing requirement