Housing
Having a safe, secure and affordable homes are a basic necessity and are an important factor in creating sustainable communities and ensuring people have a high quality of life. A key role of a Local Plan is to provide a strategy for development in terms of the size, quantity and tenure of new homes.
Housing tenures refer to the legal arrangements by which people occupy their homes such as affordable housing. Housing mix looks at the type e.g. houses or flats and size of housing e.g 3 bedrooms, that might be built.
What should the Local Plan’s priorities be for the mix and tenures of homes? This includes options on:
Affordable housing number and location
The size and type of housing
Supported and specialist housing,
Residential care and nursing homes
Self and custom build homes
Gypsy and Traveller accommodation needs
A settlement hierarchy is a way of grouping settlements into certain categories, for example a hierarchy may include cities, towns, villages and hamlets, each of which will be of differing size, have different levels of services and facilities and different functions. This hierarchy of settlements can then be used to develop planning policies which can set out what is acceptable in planning terms for an area and provide a guide for acceptable locations for the distribution of new growth. The policies included in the local plan can then be used to assess planning applications.
Our current Local Plan groups Huntingdonshire’s settlements as follows.
Spatial Planning Areas: Huntingdon including Brampton and Godmanchester, St Neots including Little Paxton, St Ives including parts of surrounding parishes in the contiguous built-up area, Ramsey including Bury
Key Service Centres: Buckden, Fenstanton, Kimbolton, Sawtry, Somersham, Warboys, and Yaxley
Small Settlements: all other villages containing 30 or more homes
The Countryside: All land outside of these is considered to be the countryside including hamlets of less than 30 homes, small clusters and individual properties.
Chapters 6 and 12 of our Further Issues and Options consultation document provide details of the different options available for housing.
The Local Plan Engagement 2024 is open from 18 September to 27 November 2024. You can participate in the consultation by visiting our online consultation platform here.
