Issue - meetings

Report HPR2022/035

The Committee considered a report seeking the endorsement of the Housing Delivery Test (HDT) Action Plan 2021. The Government’s HDT results for 2021 showed that Bromley’s housing delivery for the three-year period 2018-2021 fell below 95% of the Borough housing target for this period. As a result, national planning policy stated that the Local Planning Authority (LPA) should publish an action plan to: identify the reasons for under-delivery; explore ways to reduce the risk of further under-delivery; and set out measures the authority intended to take to improve levels of delivery.

A Member asked for further information relating to the responses received following the ‘call for sites’ consultation exercise that had been undertaken. The Head of Planning Policy and Strategy advised that around 95 responses had been received, which was a good rate. This had been the initial consultation on the Local Plan and work was ongoing to assess the sites, with a view to initiate the next stage of the Local Plan towards the end of 2022. It was noted that the ‘call for sites’ responses would also help inform strategies on housing supply and possibly land for economic use.

A Member highlighted paragraph 2.7 of the report, which related to data collection changes and stated that ‘these issues will hopefully be rectified by summer 2022 and missing housing schemes uploaded into the new system’. The Head of Planning Policy and Strategy advised that this related to the new monitoring system that the GLA had moved to, and the teething issues that had been experienced. Over the last year, there had been manual validation of data, and there may be permissions that the team were unaware of, that could potentially increase the delivery rate. However, it was highlighted that this was unlikely as a detailed validation exercise had been undertaken. Another Member questioned whether all builds were picked up and fed into the database – due to the implications of this, there was a need to ensure that the numbers were correct. The Head of Planning Policy and Strategy considered that the methods used by the GLA were fairly robust but there was the potential for schemes to “fall through the gap”. If there were specific premises that were a concern, he would be happy to feed this back to the GLA to check that they had been captured.

A Member enquired as to how the builds were reported and how long they took to appear on the system. The Head of Planning Policy and Strategy advised that the system was continually updated by the GLA using various sources of data, such as Council Tax, and once a year a comprehensive ‘starts and completions survey’ was undertaken. This involved officers looking at the list of schemes to check if they had been started or reached practical completion and were at a level where they could be occupied. In response to a further question, the Head of Planning Policy and Strategy said that the figures for 2022  ...  view the full minutes text for item 18