Consultants behind new housing plan in south Warwickshire told to go back to drawing board after concerns

Consultants working on the new South Warwickshire Local Plan are being asked to go back to the drawing board amid “considerable unhappiness” over expected housing numbers.

That was the contention of Councillor Chris King Warwick District Council’s portfolio holder for place, who oversees the authority's work on planning policy and delivery, as he updated fellow district councillors on progress last week.

The plan will set out proposed locations for new housing, workplaces and infrastructure across the districts of Warwick and Stratford in the years ahead.

There are several phases to go through and there have been delays, and this latest issue could cause more with both districts being earmarked for more housing that originally anticipated in previous calculations.

The data comes from a housing and economic development needs assessment, known for simplicity as HEDNA, a document produced by consultants Iceni Projects Limited.

It says that projected extra housing need in Coventry is not as high as anticipated back in 2014 based on the latest Census data.

Large urban cities are often unable to meet the growth needs in the space they have and rely on surrounding areas to build more to cater for population growth.

The reduction in Coventry's numbers may have been expected to result in lower numbers for surrounding districts and boroughs but the same assessment showed that demand is on the rise across the districts of Warwick and Stratford, leading to an increase in the volume of new homes required.

The trend-based assessment shows 600 fewer new homes per year are required across Coventry and Warwickshire as a whole but Stratford district’s requirement has shot up by more than 300 – from 564 to 868 per year – while Warwick district’s has gone from 675 to 811 per year.

It should be noted the lower numbers would have been affected more by the initial expectation that Coventry needed to build more than 3,000 extra homes per year, a figure that has come down to just under 2,000 but Cllr King said members of both authorities had concerns over the calculations and that Iceni had been tasked with looking at alternative options ahead of the next meeting to discuss the plan.

“To be blunt, there is considerable unhappiness from within Warwick District Council and Stratford-on-Avon District Council over the housing requirements as prescribed by HEDNA,” he said.

“Following the advisory group meeting on December 21 about HEDNA, it was agreed to ask Iceni, our consultants, to undertake additional work which should be able to report back to the next scheduled advisory group meeting on February 22.”

He said that Iceni had been asked to review alternative models to the standard method and HEDNA used by other authorities, changes to the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) – the national guidance that all local planning policies must comply with – “review the robustness” of the HEDNA’s five and 20-year projections of housing need, provide details of the evidence that informed and underpinned the HEDNA and look for “exceptional circumstances to justify” either council taking a different approach to standard methods of calculation.

The latest timetable on the South Warwickshire Local Plan website anticipates it being adopted in December 2027. Until then, current planning policies will remain.