Start to Finish

  

There is a growing recognition that large-scale housing development can and should play a large role in meeting housing need. Garden towns and villages – planned correctly– can deliver sustainable new communities and take development pressure off less sustainable locations or forms of development.

However, what looks good on paper needs to deliver in practice. Plans putting forward large sites to meet need must have a justification for the assumptions they make about how quickly sites can start providing new homes, and be reasonable about the rate of development. That way, a local authority can decide how far it needs to complement its large-scale release with other sites – large or small – elsewhere in its district.

This research – the winner of the 2017 RTPI Research Award - looks at the evidence on speed and rate of delivery of large-scale housing based on a large number of sites across England and Wales (outside London).