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STOKE GABRIEL PARISH COUNCIL

Notes of meeting held on 31^st January 2006 about Affordable Housing

Present: Dave Kenyon, Housing Officer; Graham Swiss, Forward Planning Officer

Andrew Fiske, Housing Officer; Debbie Holloway, SHDC

 Apologies: Sue Southwell, Bill Deval, Jeremy Bentley

 Richard Tully, Parish Council Chairman welcomed everyone to the meeting, and apologised on behalf of Sue Southwell, Rural Housing Enabler who was unable to attend due to illness.  Mr Tully read out the draft results of the Housing Survey which Sue had conducted. The percentage of forms returned was high and most of those who returned their forms were in favour of some form of affordable housing.  Of 590 forms delivered, 271 were returned.

 Graham Swiss gave a report about the planning policy and timescales involved.  What used to be called Local Plans are now Local Development Frameworks or LDFs but the new system is causing some delay.  The Core Strategy document for South Hams has just been published, showing plans for new housing and employment.  The figure put forward for Stoke Gabriel is 30 new dwellings, whereas Stoke Gabriel had not previously been mentioned.  There are 6 weeks in which to comment on the document, which is not site specific at present. 

After that time, specific sites will be identified, focusing on where the need is greatest i.e. Totnes, Kingsbridge and Dartmouth.  Then the villages will be identified, which could take 2 to 3 years to go through.  They expect to adopt the document by the end of this year.  In order to make the process go through more quickly, they could adopt an exception site policy for 100% affordable housing.  This would be outside the main village, immediately adjoining the development boundary.  A landowner would have to put forward a site, but this may not necessarily be the best site.  Then the funding would have to be found.

 An alternative option would be a site comprising a mixture of open market housing and affordable housing (probably two thirds) as this requires less public funding.  The sale of the open market houses would help to fund the rest.  The criteria for this must be: local need; that the site has been advertised; the level of opinion on that site.  If the council departs from the Local Plan or LDF they must notify the government.

 Debbie Holloway explained more about the funding; public funding would be needed, but for the one-third/two-thirds mix, the need for funding would be reduced.  The timescale for both options would be approximately 2 to 3 years.  As the Housing Association bids two years in advance, realistically we are looking at 2008.

 Dave Kenyon stated that if the planning application came in now it would be refused because it is not within the LDF.  However, because the results of the survey look positively towards building affordable housing, things may now move forward more quickly than he had originally thought, and a one-third/two-thirds mix looks more feasible.