Meeting Housing Needs

Ensuring we meet the Borough’s need for new dwellings is a key government priority and is central to Darlington’s Local Plan - we need to identify enough housing sites to maintain a supply of new dwellings throughout the twenty year plan period.

There are a number of sites which have previously been identified as potential sites for housing – we will make sure that these are still available and still suitable for housing, and that there is evidence that they will be sufficiently attractive to developers to make them happen.

We will also need to find additional housing sites – probably on land which hasn’t been considered for development before. This is because we are planning for a longer time period, and because our population growth is likely to be larger than was previously thought. There also needs to be flexibility in our plan – so we can still provide enough houses if some sites don’t come forward as planned.

Under this theme we are:

• Assessing the planning permissions which have already been approved and considering when they will be built so we know how many new dwellings we can rely on them providing
• Assessing the new sites which were put forward as having potential for housing development during the ‘Call  for Sites’ in August 2016
• Using the Strategic Housing and Employment Land Availability Assessment process (HELAA) to document the sites’ potential to contribute to sustainable development as well any key constraints which would need to be overcome for them to come forward in the plan period
• Gathering the evidence to support detailed and specific site allocation policies to ensure the sites are both viable and sustainable, including the timing of development any infrastructure required to support development
• Engaging with the masterplanning work and neighbourhood planning work being undertaken on key strategic sites and other areas around the Borough
• Taking a Borough wide, strategic view to select the most sustainable and viable areas for to allocate in the Borough’s portfolio of housing sites
• Engaging key stakeholders to ensure our housing policies can be delivered individually and as a whole.

Updated information will be posted on this page in relation to housing needs matters, including details of further engagement and consultation, in due course.