North Northants SHLAA
North Northamptonshire has been identified as a key part of the Milton Keynes and South Midlands Growth Area and will need to accommodate significant housing and employment growth to 2021 and beyond.
In March 2009, Roger Tym & Partners, supported by Lambert Smith Hampton, completed the first Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment (SHLAA) for North Northamptonshire.
The SHLAA forms part of the Local Development Framework evidence base. It considers the potential supply of housing from a range of settlements and planned sustainable urban extensions across North Northamptonshire over a 20-year period. It is the first step towards achieving the necessary housing growth for the area and forms part of the evidence base to inform the distribution of growth post-2021.
The principal aim of the study was to inform the preparation of Local Development Frameworks for Corby, East Northamptonshire, Kettering and Wellingborough. A robust evidence base of potential locations for residential development is essential for a credible, deliverable LDF.
We assessed the housing potential of sites across 40 existing settlements and five urban extensions. In total, we looked at 577 sites across the study area, plus sites that have extant permission for housing use. Each site was categorised according to its performance against a range of ‘suitability', ‘availability' and ‘achievability' criteria.
GIS was used to great effect in this project. We compiled a spatial database of potential housing sites and used GIS to perform quantitative assessments on the potential development constraints. This added an extra dimension to the study allowing more exact analysis in greater quantities.
