Over the last months I have made reference to the future plans for housing in East Hants, and in the last few weeks the Joint Core Strategy has been released as a draft version which will shortly be available for public consultation. This sets out the housing needs for East Hants as a whole, and this article will set this out for Horndean and the settlements in the District.
First off some definitions and background to explain how all of this is worked out.
Joint Core Strategy:
Planning authorities produce a document called ‘A Local Plan’. For us in East Hants where we have a strip of the South Downs National Park in the middle of the planning district, our patch has two planning authorities (SDNP and EHDC). Rather than each authority formulate a separate local plan, we have shared resource and cost and produced one together. This makes some sense as while our we might have two sets of planning authorities, the rate of births, deaths, business growth, average age etc are all ignorant to this. Our Local Plan is therefore known as ‘The Joint Core Strategy’ or JCS.
SHMA:
In order to work out what sort of housing needs we have, a report called a SHMA is produced. This is a ‘Strategic Housing Market Assessment’. It looks at the population and determines what the true housing need will be over the coming years. In our case this SHMA runs from 2011 to 2028, a 18 year period in all. The SHMA focuses on the district itself and considers the following:
Are there enough homes at the moment. (No. We do not have enough affordable housing or first time buyer homes)
What type of housing are we currently short of. (Lower value properties and smaller homes for the elderly to down size into while remaining in the community)
How is the population changing. (Living longer, typically with 2.4 children)
What are the average number of occupants in a house. (Broken homes or single parents mean fewer people per home which increases housing need)
Essentially, the SHMA identifies that over this 18 year period, our housing need gets greater, and by quite a bit actually. This means that we need to plan for this housing to make sure that our social structure grows to suit our needs so that we have the right provision at the right time.
This does mean more housing, but this is essentially due to population growth, and is not the fault of any government, but responsible governance means planning for it. If we do not, then our children who already struggle to get on the property ladder will struggle more as house prices remain out of reach, and the elderly will not be able to down size into more suitable properties, releasing equity on the way. Supply has to equal demand. This takes us onto ‘Where to build’
SHLAA sites:
Local Authorities know what the housing need is, but they need to be able to plan in where this might go so that developers can plan with confidence, and other agencies can plan infrastructure to suit. Roads, utilities etc. Land owners outside of the Settlement Policy Boundary who are happy to develop their land can put it forward as a ‘SHLAA’ site – Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment. Generally this results in more land being put forward for development than is needed, so the local authorities are able to select some of these to identify ‘allocated sites’ and reject others as undesirable. this is like a ‘first sifting’ process. The current SHLAA site map for Horndean is below: (Areas in Green are The South Downs National Park)
Allocations:
Next, East Hants needs to decide which of these sites is suitable for development, and which we do not wish to see built out. Just because a site has been put forward as a SHLAA site, it does not mean it will get planning permission. For example, HD018 and HD008-5 are large sites in the centre / North of Horndean, but both are in land designated as ‘local gap’ which is designated to protect the different villages from merging together. This process will take 18 months or so, and will involve some consultation, so if you have an opinion then when this process starts it is important that you voice your thoughts.
What we want to achieve in this process:
The Right housing in The Right place with The Right facilities
SHMA Housing Needs By Settlement:
Alton – 1682
Liphook – 799
Four Marks / Medstead – 493
Grayshott – 48
Villages North of SDNP – 474
Whitehill & Bordon – 2932
Petersfield – 917
Liss – 310
SDNP Villages – 452
Horndean – 1190
Clanfield – 521
Rowlands Castle – 242
Total – 10,060
Housing In Horndean:
Horndean needs to have about 1,190 new homes between 2011 and 2028. 490 of these have been identified already and include sites with planning permission (Gales, Havant Road etc) and an allowance for new homes that will be built inside the settlement policy boundary (SPB) where normal planning rules apply, but a further 700 new homes are required on top of the current plans outside of the SPB.
(Horndean includes Horndean, Blendworth, Catherington and Lovedean, and is ‘The Civil Parish of Horndean’)
This will mean a significant change for Horndean in these 18 years as these 1,190 homes are built in the villages around us.
We are currently looking at how we robustly protect some of the sites that we are desperate to protect against development, but also what sites we might be happy to see built out that we can link with the facilities we would like to have.
Every new home will come with approximately £11,000 of CIL (Community Infrastructure Levy) so the new homes in Horndean will being in £13,090,000 to create new facilities. This might include a number of the following: a small leisure centre, cricket pitch with pavilion, football pitches with changing rooms or better facilities for schools and community associations.
The next step is to assess which of the SHLAA sites can best satisfy our needs and what the community gets out of them. A very good site to use will be one which does not add any traffic to our roads, and does not affect anyones views. HD020 would be a good example of such a site.
Click here to see the EHDC SHMA
Click here to see the draft JCS with changes tracked through
Further updates will be posted here as they come.
