South Ayrshire Local Plan

Housing Requirements

Current household forecasts for the South Ayrshire Housing Market Area are such that in the future it will not be possible to meet demand for housing from the existing Housing Land Supply (this includes sites that have the benefit of planning consent or which have previously been agreed by the Council for housing development). This deficiency will be especially evident in the Sub-Housing Market Area of Ayr and North Carrick, with the towns of Ayr, Prestwick and Troon under considerable housing pressure.

The Ayrshire Structure Plan provides the context for assessing the housing land requirements that the Local Plan aims to address. In this context there is a requirement to provide sufficient housing, at least to the medium term period (2012/13)

In identifying sufficient land to meet the housing requirement, various components, or types of land, are provided for in the policies of the Plan. A Technical Working Note, which accompanies the Plan, provides a guide to understanding the detail of this process and lists all the sites together with the contribution that each site can make to meeting the Plan requirement. However, the table below provides an outline of the estimated number of houses that can be built from the various aspects of the land supply forming part of this Plan – as provided by policies H2A, H2B, H3A and H4, which follow on in this chapter.

	5 Year Period to 2010/11	Medium Term Period to 2012/13	Longer Term Period to 2013/14
Requirement from the approved Ayrshire Joint Structure Plan	2315	2979	3310
Draft 2004 HLS, excluding H2A and H2B sites	894	1488	1783
H2A and H2B sites	789	849	869
Balance	-105	-639	-915
H3A and H3B sites	250	450	550
Balance	145	-189	-365

Base date of 2004, reflecting Draft 2004 Housing Land Supply and housing land requirements 2004 onwards. Utilising adoption date of 2006 to derive position for 5 year, medium and longer term positions. NB the land supply estimates shown above only include the output contribution for the period given.

Table 1 sets out the housing land requirements for the five year period (2006-2010/11), the medium term to 2012 and the longer term to 2013. Provided in the row below each of these time periods is the expected contribution from the existing housing land supply, which comprises those sites that have already been allocated for housing purposes, usually through the grant of planning consent or in a previous local plan. This demonstrates that there are substantial housing land deficiencies in all of the time periods. Even accounting for the expected contribution arising from the housing provisions of policies H2A and H2B there remains deficiencies in all the time period. Policies H3A and H3B, therefore, aim to meet the substantial part of the remaining shortfall.

Housing land requirements provided in the Ayrshire Joint Structure Plan are the requirements for all markets of housing, including affordable housing. Policy H13 refers to affordable housing need and the Council is fully committed to meeting these needs. However, these need estimates and the housing land requirements are not directly comparable, in that they derive from different methodologies and from different sources. However, the affordable housing needs are not additional to the requirements of the structure plan.

Whilst these figures are based on an assumption that past growth trends will continue, it would be wise to account for a continuation of this trend in the interests of planning in the most environmentally sound and sustainable way. Therefore, policies H2A, H2B, H3A, H3B and H4 seek to meet not only the requirement in the medium term but to substantially address the emerging housing requirement in the ten year period.