Five-year housing land supply explained

The five-year supply

Authorities are expected to identify a supply of specific, deliverable sites sufficient to provide a minimum of five years' worth of housing against their requirement, with a buffer applied in defined circumstances. Supply is expressed as a number of years, so 3.4 years means a shortfall.

Deliverability is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Sites with detailed permission are generally treated as deliverable; allocations and outline sites need clear evidence that completions will begin within five years.

The Housing Delivery Test

The Housing Delivery Test compares homes delivered over the previous three years with homes required. A result below 95 per cent triggers an action plan, below 85 per cent adds a 20 per cent buffer to the supply calculation, and below 75 per cent applies the presumption in favour of sustainable development.

The tilted balance

Where relevant policies for the supply of housing are out of date — including where the five-year supply cannot be demonstrated or the delivery test falls below the threshold — permission should be granted unless the adverse impacts would significantly and demonstrably outweigh the benefits, or specific policies indicate development should be restricted.

This is what practitioners mean by the tilted balance. It does not suspend Green Belt, heritage or flood risk policy, but it materially changes the odds for sustainable edge-of-settlement sites.

How to use these figures

For a landowner, the practical reading is simple. An authority with a healthy supply, an up-to-date plan and a passing delivery test will resist unallocated sites. An authority with a shortfall, an ageing plan and a failing test is where speculative and promoted sites succeed most often — and where timing a submission or application matters most.