Local development plans - deliverability of site allocations: research

Footnotes

1. Town & Country Planning (Development Planning) (Scotland) Regulations 2008

2. Viability in property markets is typically taken to mean that a development appraisal produces a positive financial result when comparing costs with returns, at today’s date and including discounting.  Deliverability is a more holistic consideration of the potential to develop the site, including viability.

3. As a declaration of research interest, readers should note that Annexes D – F to the withdrawn draft guidance are based upon the unpublished Stage 4 of Ryden’s Planning for Infrastructure Research Report (2015) for the Scottish Government.

4. Proposal 5: Making Plans that Deliver, question 7(a).

5. National Planning Policy Framework, Department for Communities and Local Government, March 2012

6. https://www.gov.uk/guidance/local-plans--2

7. Longitudinal Viability Study of the Planning Process, Welsh Government, February 2017

8. 36 responses were received; 2 were duplicates which the consultants blended into single responses 

9. Only one authority specifically mentioned that schools capacity should be assessed by site promoters. Schools are implied under the infrastructure heading in the survey, but the potential for lack of schools capacity to impede housing development might have been expected to feature more specifically and more strongly.

10. That might be prompted by the consultant team as it relates to an assessment undertaken for the authority by Ryden.

11. http://www.gov.scot/Topics/Statistics/About/Methodology/UrbanRuralClassification

12. RTPI reports that local planning authority staffing has fallen by 23% since the Global Financial Crisis and now accounts for only 0.44% of local authority budgets.

13. Ryden would note that this is a market-wide failure since the 2008 Global Financial Crisis. Many local and regional developers either failed or cannot attract upfront funding to deliver sites – even 10 years on. The small sites and alternative sectors policies noted here may potentially help to re-stimulate these sectors. 

14. The Steering Group noted that site conditions for previously developed land can be a major variable which is difficult to capture in a standard sites assessment template. This was also evident in the calls for sites forms used by different planning authorities and in consultations with, for example, former mining areas or former heavy industry areas having a particular need to understand whether sites are affected.

15. For example: 

Perth & Kinross Council’s Proposed Local Development Plan 2 Policy 23: Delivery of Development Sites requires that for “sites of 300 houses or more the Delivery Strategy should demonstrate how delivery will be maximised, including proposals for involving a range of developers and provision for self-build.” 

Aberdeenshire Council's Development Management Manual identifies:

a. Scale 1: Very large >600 houses, multi-use, more than one site, more than one 5 year development period and more than one developer

b. Scale 2: Large 50-600 houses, multi use, single neighbourhood, single site

16. As an output from the appraisal, not the site price as an input. 

17. Planning Permission in Principle for Sites Allocation in the Development Plan (Ryden, 2016)

18. For example:

Gas distribution network developer information: www.sgn.co.uk/Publications/Infrastructure-Developers/

Electricity distribution network: https://www.ssepd.co.uk/Connections/Developers/

Water: www.scottishwater.co.uk/business/Connections/Connecting-your-property/Planning-Your-Development

19. This is not only to aid analysis and interpretation but also to help close the information gap identified in Section 3. 

20. For example, the Three Dragons Toolkit uses standard market information in lieu of project-specific development data:  https://three-dragons.co.uk/toolkits/

21. Planning, Collar, 2010. The ‘site-specific argument’ point was made in the 3^rd edition (2010) at the transition to LDPs and is not repeated in the 4^th edition (2016), but neatly summarises the market reality.