The Housing Delivery Test (HDT) is an annual measurement of housing delivery. If housing delivery falls below 95% of the local planning authority’s housing requirement over the previous three years, an Action Plan should be prepared six months after the publication of the HDT (for us this is 14 June 2022). The Action Plan assesses the causes of under delivery and identifies actions to help increase delivery in future years.

The Action Plan has been prepared in collaboration with teams across the Council - Spatial Planning and Delivery, Development Management and Housing. We have discussed issues with Devon County Council and also gathered views from landowners, agents and developers.

Key points

Part 1: Delivery analysis

• No fundamental barriers to delivery/commencement on development sites exist across the district
• Over 90% of our housing sites are large sites (i.e. over 10 plots). Mainly on allocated sites in the Local Plan. These strategic allocations take longer to come forward as they are often more complicated
• We have effective partnership working with Devon County Council at a strategic level

Part 2: Actions to support housing delivery

• Action 1 – Progressing towards finalisation of a Proposed Submission Local Plan later this year which will include a broad range of site sizes including a substantial proportion of smaller allocations
• Action 2 - Increasing the use of Planning Performance Agreements (PPAs) across all scales of development and stages of the development management process
• Action 3 - Determining planning applications that are clearly not acceptable for development without negotiation unless a PPA timetable is in place. Also proactively offering a pre application service
• Action 4 – Working with developers and infrastructure providers to unlock development through the early delivery of infrastructure improvements