You could be forgiven for thinking there is surely now a plentiful supply of housing and no need to allocate any more land for development when you travel around the area and see huge swathes of land being built on .. well you would be wrong.

Boris Johnson and the Government have recently promised to target building 300,000 homes a year to make more housing affordable for younger people struggling to get on the housing ladder and furthermore went on to publish a revised planning policy document known as the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) which requires local authorities to identify and update annually a supply of deliverable sites sufficient to provide a minimum of 5 years’ worth of housing against their calculated housing requirement set out in their adopted strategic policies.

Take for example Lancaster City Council – only 2 years ago it demonstrated through its Local Plan that they had a sufficient housing sites identified to satisfy a 5 year supply which governs their Local housing policies and, whilst this supply still exists, under the new test set by NNPF, it is shown that the supply will not be delivered within the required 5 year timeline and in real terms the deliverable allocated land is well below a 5 year supply which may and will probably result in more land being brought forward within the Lancaster and surround areas even though the local plan was only recently adopted.

Each Local Authority is different and each council has a different housing need calculation to satisfy but the changes to the planning policy means that more opportunities may lie ahead, the appetite and need of land for development and housing seems to be insatiable at the moment, there are many active developers and promoters looking to acquire short or medium term interest in strategic land therefore it really does pay