What’s Wrong with the Housing Target?

[These arguments have been expanded and refined on this page]

The December 2014 version of the Strategic Housing Market Assessment (SHMA) for Hart District Council, and Surrey Heath and Rushmoor Borough Councils (together the Housing Market Area) can be found here.

The SHMA above calls for around 7,534 houses to be built in Hart District over the period from 2011-2031 and 23,600 over the whole area. It is built on a process mandated by the Government, but at almost every stage the decisions taken err on the side of building more houses.  Examples of this are:

• The starting point for the housing need is population projection.  The Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG) population projections would lead to an overall need for 790 houses per annum across the whole Housing Market Area, or 15,800 houses in total.  This approach in itself essentially says that if you have carried out lots of development in the past (such as Elevetham Heath, Queen Elizabeth Barracks and St. Mary’s Park), you must continue to develop at that rate even though there has been net migration out of the area in recent years.

• However, the report then states that the ONS usually understates these requirements so cherry picks inward migration data from the time we were building most housing, reverses the recent trend in average household size makes an arbitrary adjustment upwards to 925 houses per annum, leading to a need for 2,700 additional houses over the plan period and taking the total to 18,500.

• During the unsustainable economic boom from 1998 to 2008, the whole housing market area created jobs at  around 720 per annum.  Over the full economic cycle from 1998 to 2012 the whole area generated jobs at a rate of 529 per annum.  The report assumes that up to 2031 the area will create jobs at more than double this, at a rate of 1,130 per annum.  This has the effect of increasing the number of houses required to 1,180 per annum, or a total of 23,600 houses.  Over the plan period this leads to a need for a further 5,100 extra houses being required.

The combination of these and other assumptions is that the combined area of Hart, Surrey Heath and Rushmoor needs to build an additional 7,800 houses (of which around a third is allocated to Hart District) over and above the government starting point which adds to the pressure on our green spaces and adds to congestion.

The impact on Hart is we have to build 7,534 houses.  But Surrey Heath and Rushmoor have said that we need to build 3,100 houses that they say they can’t build in their own area.  This pushes up our target to around 10,600 houses.  If the questionable assumptions in the SHMA were taken away, our housing target would fall substantially to around 6,100 houses, but there may be opportunities to shift some of our remaining target on to Surrey Heath and Rushmoor.