SESplan Supplementary Guidance on Housing Land

Overview

SESplan, the Strategic Development Plan for Edinburgh and South East Scotland, was approved by Scottish Ministers on 27 June 2013, with modifications. The most significant modification relates to the phasing and distribution of the overall SESplan housing requirement.

Through their modifications, Scottish Ministers increased the overall number of houses that local development plans across the SESplan area must plan to deliver in the periods from now to 2019 and from 2019 to 2024. In total, the six SESplan authorities must now plan for at least an additional 24,338 houses over these two periods.  This figure is in addition to land which is already allocated for housing or has planning permission.

Scottish Ministers require that Supplementary Guidance is prepared by SESplan to provide detailed further information for Local Development Plans (LDPs) on how much of the total housing requirement should be met by the LDPs of each of the six SESplan authorities for each plan period.

In preparing the consultation draft Supplementary Guidance, the SESplan authorities have accepted that the City of Edinburgh cannot accommodate all of its own housing need and demand. The Supplementary Guidance therefore proposes that East Lothian and those other authorities best placed strategically to deliver the additional housing allowance take a proportion of this, in addition to meeting their own housing need and demand.

The need to meet the overall SESplan housing requirements for the periods from now to 2019 and 2019-2024 is not open to debate. What is being consulted on is the proposed breakdown of the housing allowance between the six local authorities in the two plan periods 2009-2019 and 2019-2024.

The draft Supplementary Guidance proposes that East Lothian takes 3,533 of the 24,338 housing allowance, approximately 1,400 of these by 2019 and 2,150 houses between 2019 and 2024. This, and the proposed breakdown between the other five SESplan authorities, is shown in the table below.

This 'additional housing allowance' is additional to the anticipated contribution from existing housing sites across the SESplan area. In East Lothian’s case, this amounts to a contribution of 4,845 houses to 2019 and a further 1,640 between 2019 and 2024 (based on Audit '12). Therefore, if the additional SESplan allowance of 3,533 houses is confirmed, then the East Lothian Local Development Plan would have to plan to deliver a combined total of just over 10,000 houses between now and 2024.

Additional Housing Allowance by Council Area