A local councillor has hit out at Wiltshire Council for its inability to secure a five-year housing land supply, which has resulted in 550 extra homes being built in the area since 2014, which have not been planned for.
Wiltshire Council is required to identify sites for housing development, and government policy requires them to find a minimum of five years’ supply to ensure housing targets are met. The consequence of not having a five- year housing land supply is that councils may start to lose control over where new homes are built.
In 2022, Wiltshire Council had a 4.72-year supply, but they recently announced that this year’s supply has fallen to 4.6. Wiltshire Council and Westbury town councillor, Gordon King, says that as a result of this inability to find a full five years of housing land supply, developments are often granted planning permission in inappropriate sites such as Sandhole Lane in Westbury, which was given the green light on appeal despite objection by Westbury Town Council and refusal by Wiltshire Council.
He said, “The government’s demand that every local planning authority must provide a continuous five-year land supply for development purposes is tough to achieve and places communities at the mercy of unplanned and unwanted development, too often in the wrong place and without attendant infrastructure.
“Wiltshire Council has not been able to achieve a five-year land supply for some time and Westbury has paid dearly for it as planning inspectors are all too willing to automatically allow development whilst ignoring the disadvantages where those disadvantages, according to the local plan, are greater than the benefits of allowing it. A good example of this is the granting of planning permission for 67 dwellings on land south of Sandhole Lane in Westbury where the disadvantages of building on a difficult site with inadequate access will put the existing settlement under pressure, which is both unacceptable and unforgivable.
“The longer Wiltshire Council cannot offer a five-year land supply, the greater the problem will be. Since 2014, Westbury has received more than 550 new homes that were never planned or expected, and it is likely that such a trend will continue for as long as the government fails to reform its policy.
“As Westbury has grown close to the limit of its settlement boundary, development is more and more likely to occur outside its policy limit as it has before, on land designated to villages. It is clear that those settlements will look to Westbury and impact on Westbury and its services but will never be part of Westbury, yet Westbury will suffer the cost. Rather these settlements will be part of a village that will be distant and to which it will always have little in common. Such is the lunacy of Wiltshire Council’s community governance and spatial planning policies.
“This government, a self-promoting champion of localism, must realise that the whole issue of state sponsored development control in the guise of the five-year land supply is in need of urgent reform. It has instituted a consultation process on possible reform, though it is dragging its feet on publishing the outcomes. Until the system is reformed and local choice restored, communities all over the country, like Westbury, will continue to suffer unplanned and unwanted development. Change should not always take that long.”
