HBF members meet to agree a programme of work to critically assess Swale Borough Council's urban capacity study.
A number of representatives of HBF member companies operating in Kent met on 20th August to discuss forming a working group to critically assess work done by Swale Borough Council on estimating future urban capacity in the borough.
The Council has produced a technically detailed assessment of capacity in preparation for the local plan review which will be published next year. However, the Borough Council is using the results of the capacity study to refuse planning permission for greenfield sites currently allocated in the adopted local plan despite the fact that the results of the study have not been subject to any detailed scrutiny. This is particularly worrying to house builders as Swale is thousand of houses short of meeting the adopted structure plan housing requirement yet it still refuses to release greenfield sites on the basis of the results of the UCS.
Whilst the study is generally robust in the principle of its approach, its accuracy as a predictive tool to forecast future development on previously developed land and windfalls will stand or fall on the assumptions made in the study regarding individual sites. This in turn will largely be determined by factors not considered in the study such as ownership, flooding, likelihood of firms relocating and land values in bringing these sites forward for development taking into account the likely requirements for planning obligations.
HBF members have agreed to carry out their own detailed assessment of the sites taking into account these factors to determine whether or not the Council's assumptions made in the study about individual sites are reasonable. This work will be carried out over the next few months and will be submitted to the Borough Council to feed in to the preliminary stages of the review of the local plan.
For further information on this work or planning issues in Kent generally please contact HBF regional planner for the southern region, Pete Errington on 023 8067 1030 or at pete.errington@hbf.co.uk