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Out-Law News 2 min. read

Midlands council says it does not have capacity to take neighbouring council's housing overspill


A Midlands council has said it does not have the capacity to provide the additional homes allocated to it under a joint plan to deal with a shortage of housing land in Coventry.

Nuneaton and Bedworth Borough Council (NBBC), one of six local authorities within the Coventry and Warwickshire Housing Market Area (HMA), said it would not sign a memorandum of understanding under which it had been allocated an additional 73 homes per year to help address Coventry's shortfall.

Under the Localism Act local authorities have a duty to co-operate with neighbouring councils by consulting and engaging with them on strategic matters when preparing local plans. Coventry City Council withdrew its draft local plan from examination in 2013 after a planning inspector said it had failed in its duty to co-operate and recommended that a joint strategic housing market assessment (SHMA) was produced with other councils in the HMA.

Warwick District Council's local plan was also recommended for withdrawal from examination in June 2015, when the examining inspector identified a housing shortfall in the HMA and rejected the proposed approach of adopting individual local plans and then undertaking early plan reviews.

The Coventry, Warwickshire and South West Leicestershire Shadow Economic Prosperity Board met last week to discuss the latest updates to the SHMA for the area and options for addressing Coventry's identified shortfall of up to 17,800 homes. According to a report produced for the meeting, an approach based on existing migration and commuting trends to and from Coventry was used to produce a memorandum of understanding (MoU) allocating additional homes to the surrounding boroughs and districts depending on the strength of their relationships to the city.

Warwick District Council (DC), Stratford-upon-Avon DC, Rugby Borough Council (BC), North Warwickshire BC and Coventry City Council all agreed that they would seek to endorse the MoU by the end of November 2015. However, NBBC, which was identified as having a particularly strong relationship with Coventry, said it was still working on its own strategic housing land availability assessment (SHLAA) and would not commit to cover Coventry's shortfall until its consultation process was complete.

Leader of NBBC, Dennis Harvey, said in a statement: "We are the only borough in Warwickshire that doesn't have the capacity to take the suggested overflow of housing from Coventry under the duty to co-operate. For this reason I was unable to sign the MoU which went against the evidence of our own SHLAA. If our revised SHLAA means that we need to consider allocating land for housing that is not in the Borough Plan being reported to cabinet tonight, there will be further consultation on that."

Planning expert Jamie Lockerbie of Pinsent Masons, the law firm behind Out-Law.com said: "This situation perfectly encapsulates the difficulties posed by the duty to co-operate. When a group of local authorities are ostensibly working together to address unmet housing need in their housing market area it only takes one of them to disrupt the process by refusing to take a share of the unmet need."

"The value of a memorandum of understanding as a piece of evidence in the plan making process diminishes if one or more of the relevant local authorities refuses to sign it," said Lockerbie. "The authorities in this situation should focus on the established principle that the duty to co-operate does not equate to a duty to agree and so should work on trying their best to address the unmet need in other ways."

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