North east council seeks High Court judgment in dispute over housing figures

Following public hearing sessions last year into the draft County Durham Plan, which is intended to guide development in the county until 2030, planning inspector Harold Stephens wrote to the Council in February (29-page / 260 KB PDF) identifying 'fundamental issues' with the Plan which he said may be incapable of being rectified by suspending its examination.

Stephens said the Council's assessment that 1,651 new homes were required in the area in each year of the plan was not reasonable and was based on unrealistically high forecasts of employment growth and inward migration. He expressed doubt as to whether the Council had taken into account the growth plans of surrounding councils and said he could not support the "huge releases of green belt land" proposed under the Plan.

In a statement released this month, the Council confirmed that Stephens had decided not to reopen public examination of the Plan. The Council's corporate director of regeneration and economic development, Ian Thompson, said that the inspector's decision "came as a disappointment" and that "the impartial advice we have received since the inspector's report was published supports our commitment to the soundness of the Plan's forecasts for job creation and homes."  

Thompson said the Council had "explored every option and opportunity" to demonstrate that the Plan offered "the best prospect for economic growth" in the area and had been left with "no choice but to pursue this matter through the courts by way of a judicial review."

Planning expert Jamie Lockerbie of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com said: "Planning for housing growth in local plans remains a significant issue for many local planning authorities. What is really interesting about this case is that it is the opposite of what we are used to seeing, i.e. an authority that has had its plan found unsound because it has planned for too many new houses, not too few.  This adds yet more fuel to the argument that there needs to be some kind of standardisation in the calculation of housing growth in the local plan context".