Stroud District – Additional Housing Options Strategy

Stroud District is consulting on an Additional Housing Options strategy document which looks at a series of development options across the District.

This is an opportunity to promote and therefore protect your land interests in Stroud District.

The Council are carrying out this exercise as a result of their findings during their Local Plan Review. As a result of recent consultations, they have revised their housing target to 786 homes per year. This is significantly higher than the Government’s Standard Method calculation of providing 638 new homes each year.

Accommodating such an uplift will be challenging and the Additional Housing Options strategy is a means of understanding how this requirement could be accommodated in terms of various distribution strategies.

As part of this work, the Council is consulting on a limited number of additional sites, which include proposals for circa 2250 homes at Whitminster and 1500 at Moreton Valence/Junction 12 M5, reflecting an on-going trend in the emerging Local Plan to allocate larger, strategic development sites.

In our opinion, there is the risk that by reinforcing its reliance on strategic sites, the Council is limiting its options for the sustainable growth of its existing diverse range of towns and villages across the District. They appear to be putting the majority of their “eggs” in a limited number of “strategic baskets”. Given the relatively restricted nature of the Plan, failure to deliver any of these proposed strategic sites will present the District with major problems regarding housing land supply.

The sites mentioned above are not yet allocated and it is not certain whether they will come forward. Bear in mind the Council may not be aware of your land and this is a chance to ensure that they are and take it into account in their deliberations in moving the Local Plan Review forward.

We can guide you through this process, we have years of experience of presenting strategic land to local authorities and getting it successfully allocated. Two of our case studies are on our website to demonstrate the work we do.

https://mplanning.co.uk/services/

Consultation closes 16 December 2020.