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Housing numbers and the ranking process.

How many houses need to be built?

The Government has set south Warwickshire a target of building 2,188 houses per year over a 25 year period. That is 54,700 houses. This does NOT mean that the Councils must find room to put 54,700 houses. They need to find space for 28,257 MORE houses than already allocated. Here’s how it works:

How has Hatton been ranked "More Suitable"?

1 - Sustainability Appraisal

Over 700 sites were put forward as part of the previous Call for Sites exercise. Some have been rejected as unsuitable and the remainder are split between parcels of land which have been put together to make potential new settlements, and smaller sites. Only the former are being consulted on at the moment.

 

The Sustainability Appraisal ranked the 12 potential new settlements against 13 Sustainability Objectives such as education facilities and flood risk. This was a very high level appraisal. The ratings for B1 are as follows: 

An  =  rating refers to the fact that the consultants could not distinguish between the 12 settlements.

This is the overall ranking of the new setlements: 

Note:

 

  1. This is a very high-level appraisal of the suitability of the 12 potential settlements. It is described as a “desktop review of available data”. It is designed to steer the Councils towards the “better” options so that they can be investigated in more detail.

  2. In some cases, the consultants have used subjective judgements rather than hard evidence to rank one settlement higher than another.

  3. As the Sustainability Appraisal is deliberately broad brush in nature, the very fact that Hatton has a station has pushed B1 up the ratings. It is not within the scope of this report to analyse all the issues we know exist with the station.

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The full Sustainability Appraisal is available on the Technical Evidence page of the SWLP website.

2 - New Settlement Assessment

A further ranking assessment - the New Settlements Assessment - was undertaken in November 2024. This drew on a wider range of evidence, such as that contained in the South Warwickshire Local Plan Strategic Transport and Education Assessment, as well as the findings of the Sustainability Appraisal. Crucially, this analysis includes a factor not taken into account in the Sustainability Appraisal: the availability of land in the new settlement locations. This wider analysis led to a very different table. It is this table, highlighting the four more suitable options, which appears in the Preferred Options consultation.

Some high ranking options from the Sustainability Appraisal, such as X1, are no longer considerable as favourable. No ranking of the four "more suitable" sites appear in the documents but it can be inferred to a degree by looking at the reasons given for choosing each of these four sites. Here is a summary of the reasons given for the suitability of these four "more suitable" sites; they are not in any order.

The availability of the land required has been a crucial deciding factor. B1, E1 and BW are the only potential settlements where 100% of the land is already available. X2 is the next highest. In five cases, e.g. C1 at Kingswood, 0% of the required land has been put forward so far. This position could change as further information becomes available.

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There are some important points to note:

  • Another limited Call for Sites exercise is underway. This is an invitation to landowners to put forward land, either within or adjacent to the potential settlements.

  • There is a large amount of technical evidence which has not been completed. For example, the severe road and rail constraints for B1 have been acknowledged but no traffic modelling data or costings are available at the moment. 

The full New Settlements Assessment is available on the Technical Evidence page of the SWLP website.

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