completions – Planning Edinburgh

Housing Land Audit and Completions Programme 2021

Map showing land supply in terms of effective and constrained sites.

Our annual Housing Land Audit and Completions Programme (HLACP) 2021 is now available to view in full on our website or as a layer on the Council Atlas.

The Programme is used to assess the supply of land for housing and the delivery of new homes within the City of Edinburgh Council area. It records the amount of land available for house building, identifies any constraints affecting development, and assesses the land supply in the area.

Sites included in the HLACP are housing sites under construction, sites with planning consent, sites in adopted or finalised Local Plans and, as appropriate, other buildings and land with agreed potential for housing development. The audit does not include new proposals from the proposed City Plan 2030.

As predicted last year, the Covid-19 pandemic and the national lockdown during the second quarter of 2020 has resulted in the number of completions over the year to April 2021 being lower than recent years. Housebuilding activity is now back to the pre-pandemic level with expected completions over the next five years averaging 2,600 per year.

*To view the data as a layer on the CEC Atlas, click ‘Planning’ and choose Housing Land Audit Schedules & Completions*

The Programme demonstrates that there is more than enough unconstrained housing land to meet the remaining housing land requirement in full and that the five-year completions programme is above target.

This short video below gives an overview of the Programme:

For a housing site to be considered ‘effective’, it must be free of all constraints that would prevent development. Sites are considered against a range of criteria set out in Planning Advice Note 2/2010 “Affordable Housing and Housing Land Audits”. These include ownership, physical (e.g. slope, aspect, stability, flood risk, access), contamination, deficit funding, marketability, infrastructure and land use.

As at 31 March 2021, there was enough land free of planning constraints and available for development for 22,411 houses.

The effective land supply is varied in type, size and location. It is spread over a range of locations and includes brownfield (54%) and greenfield (46%) sites as shown on the above map.

The next annual Housing Land Audit and Completions Programme will be carried out in Spring 2022 and reported to Planning Committee in Autumn 2022.

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City Plan 2030 – Housing Land Audit and Completions Programme 2019

cec atlas screenshot — The Housing Land and Completions Programme data on our online GIS atlas

As part of our effort to ensure we have the land available within Edinburgh to meet our need for new housing, we have published our annual Housing Land Audit and Completions Programme for 2019.

We have always looked at housing land supply, but by also looking at how much housing has been built we can get a clearer picture of where and how house-building is being held up. This video gives an overview of the findings from the 2019 audit.

You can also view the Housing Land Audit and Completions data on our online GIS Atlas, by selecting the Housing Land Audit schedule and Housing Land Audit completions tab shown in the image at the top of this post.

The key facts from this study show that our current effective supply of land for over 22,000 homes is substantially more than our target of almost 15,000 and the current rate of house completions is also above target and projected to increase over the next two years.

The study confirms the trends of the 2018 Housing Land Audit and Completions Programme and we will keep looking at our housing land supply and completions rate as we gear up to write our policies for new housing in City Plan 2030 and identify the sites where we want to direct new housing development to. We will soon start to consult on our Choices for City Plan 2030, including potential housing locations and policies, and you can keep up to date with this by:

Visiting the website at gov.uk/cityplan2030

Subscribing to this blog at https://planningedinburgh.com

Following us on twitter at @planningedin

Join in the conversation by using the #cityplan2030 hashtag

Subscribe to the newsletter by emailing us at cityplan2030@edinburgh.gov.uk

City Plan 2030 – Housing Land Audit and Completions Programme 2018

The Housing Land Audit and Completions Programme sets out the amount of land available for house building, identifies any issues and assesses the amount of land supply against the targets and required land in the Strategic Development Plan.

We’ve produced a short video which helps explain where we are with land availability and housing completions in Edinburgh:

The audit we prepare has always provided an estimate of what is likely to be built on each site, each year. The key change is that we now look at the supply of housing land, (managed by the planning system) and the delivery of new homes (by developers and landowners) as separate things.

This is better because we can see what is holding up the building of houses, and what can be done to increase the number of new houses.

Our report to the Planning Committee on 3 October 2018 shows that there is more than enough housing land, free from development constraints and that we are exceeding our five year target to build more houses.

The Review of the Scottish Planning System identified the need to be clear about how much housing land is required, and we want this new approach to help inform future policy and guidance. We have shared this with other Scottish planning authorities and had the pleasure of winning a Scottish Award for Quality in Planning for our new way of working.