Out-Law / Your Daily Need-To-Know

Teignbridge reduces housing target to 10,000 for next 20 years

29 May 2012, 4:58 pm

Teignbridge District Council has reduced its proposed Core Strategy housing target for the next 20 years, against the recommendation of a report commissioned by the Council.

The Council's Overview and Scrutiny Committee agreed that the Council should aim to build 10,000 new homes over the next 20 years, as recommended by the Council's Housing Review Group, against the advice of consultancy firm Opinion Research Services (ORS).

ORS recommended that the Council should build 12,400 new homes over the next 20 years and should aim to build 620 homes per year. In its projections, the ORS report provided evidence about demographics and migration to assess the likely housing need for the future.

The recommendation for 10,000 new homes reflects concerns by many Teignbridge residents expressed at public meetings and Core Strategy submissions, the Housing Review Group said. It used data from the latest Office for National Statistics (ONS) and ORS household information as its evidence base.

The ONS projection for population growth, including births, deaths and migration, which accounted for 60% of the population reduction, was accepted by the Housing Group in its recommendation, but the Housing Group rejected the ONS population projection for international migration accounting for 40% of the population reduction, it said.

The final ORS recommendation of 12,400 new homes is unsound in our opinion, the Housing Group said, because it ignores current Teignbridge reality and latest evidence and the model for calculating housing need is complex and not transparent.

The most recent draft of Plan Teignbridge, which was open to public consultation between January and March this year, determined a need for 14,800 new homes over 20 years from 2013-2033. This was based on a previous Strategic Housing Market Assessment (SHMA) produced in 2010.