What is the Housing Delivery Test (HDT)?
The Housing Delivery Test (HDT) is an annual measurement of housing delivery to assess the extent to which each local authority is building enough homes to meet their housing need, as determined by Central Government. Local planning authorities are required to submit housing delivery statistics for their authority area, with the Department for Levelling up, Homes & Communities (LUHC) assessing housing delivery performance against housing requirements over a rolling three-year period. For further information, please refer to the link in Related Content.
What is a Housing Delivery Test (HDT) Action Plan?
The HDT Action Plan provides an analysis of housing delivery within the district and identifies the key factors that have contributed to the under-delivery (75% of the Council’s housing requirement) of housing over the previous three years. It provides information on what the Council is currently doing to proactively increase housing delivery and what actions it should take going forward to improve the availability of land for housing, support development opportunities and ultimately increase delivery.
Why does the Council need a Housing Delivery Test (HDT) Action Plan?
The HDT is a new annual measurement of the number of homes being delivered in an area by comparing the number of new net homes delivered over the previous three years with the Council’s housing requirement over the same period.
The Government have proposed that the HDT is used as a monitoring tool to demonstrate whether local areas are building enough homes to meet their housing need. It was formally introduced in paragraph 75 of the revised National Planning policy Framework (NPPF), published in July 2018 and updated in February 2019. Councils that fail to meet delivery rate targets are required to take appropriate action to address under-delivery. In 2020, Rochford District Council was required to produce an Action Plan.
The Council’s Housing Delivery Test Action Plan 2020 is available in the Related Content section on this page.
Note – the Council was assessed to have passed the HDT in the most recent (2021) HDT (see link in Related Content).