The pressure on local authorities to produce more housing has increased in the past few years, and continues to do so, in pursuit of the government’s ambition to produce 300,000 new dwellings per annum. The Standard Method of identifying housing needs in individual local authority areas has caused much debate and not a few problems and is due to be revised during 2020 (expect a NPPF 2020 with further updates to the 2019 version). The Housing Delivery Test results for 2019 have just been published, naming and shaming those authorities that fail to deliver the quantum of housing the Standard Method deems necessary. The struggle to meet five-year housing targets means that some local authorities are overwhelmed and find themselves on the wrong site of appeal debates about the presumption in favour of development in the NPPF.

In other cases, local authorities seeking to deal with the supply situation through the local plan route struggle with the definition of ‘deliverable’ land, the definition of which has been tightened in the 2019 NPPF and find their local plans declared unsound or out of date. Wealden is the closest such authority too us, but Sevenoaks has been strongly criticised by the planning inspector over unsoundness, as has Uttlesford in Essex (which tried to meet its housing need with three ill-conceived Garden Settlements). Rother District Council has just adopted a Site Allocations Plan that was out of date before they did so, and in north Essex Braintree and Tendring are struggling, even as their local plan is being examined.

We have been advising a consortium of landowners for a number of years regarding large scale proposals for a new sustainable settlement in north Essex, as part of the North Essex Garden Communities project where the local authorities are seeking to identify an agreed strategic approach to the allocation and distribution of large-scale mixed-use development. This will include employment opportunities and infrastructure provision, in the form of Garden Communities. Areas of search for three new garden communities were contained with the Draft Local Plan consultations of all three Local Planning Authorities in 2016. An Examination into the NEGC proposals in 2018 found that further work of justification is required on certain aspects of the proposals, and of course there are third party objections to such bold and long-ranging proposals. The Examination re-opened for a three-week period in January 2020 and the inspector’s interim letter in presently awaited (February 2020)

Our present portfolio of work includes consultancy advice on residential schemes of varying sizes and in a wide range of locations. Our role in most cases is as lead consultant, reporting directly to the client, formulating and implementing a tactical approach and managing a larger development team of specialist consultants. Current instructions range from one or two units up to proposals for around 200, in a range of local authorities in Kent, Surrey, East and West Sussex and East Anglia, and further afield in locations such as Oxfordshire.

There are often quite stringent requirements from local authorities for background work, and even with smaller scale developments attention to detail and ensuring all the relevant information is provided can be a challenge. We are familiar with Environmental Impact Analysis in the larger cases.