Requests for Dorset Council to revise its assessment of the number of houses needed in the county in the draft Local Plan were met at May’s Cabinet meeting with the response that all comments made in the recent consultation will be considered before the final proposals are put forward for further public consultation.

Cabinet member for planning Councillor David Walsh told Giles Watts of the Dorset Climate Action Group that all the data from submissions and feedback from the consultation exercise was likely to be published in July, and co-operative discussion was welcome with DCAN about the significant differences of professional opinion regarding the basis for housing numbers to be used.

Mr Watts said: “This is especially true with regards to the application of ‘exceptional circumstances’ and the fact that national housing needs have changed dramatically post Brexit and post pandemic.”

Mike Allen of Sturminster Marshall further questioned the suggestion that Dorset needed to meet its own Government housing target of over 30,000 homes together with helping Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole meet their target with another 9,000 homes, requiring the release of “hundreds of hectares of Dorset’s Greenbelt land to developers”.

He highlighted the pledge of the newly re-elected West Midlands Mayor to preserve local Greenbelt and challenge the 2014 Standard Method of assessing housing need. He said the Office for Statistics Regulation had stated that reliance on that method rather than the more recent 2018 household projections produced by the Office for National Statistics meant that changes were not reflected in the statistics informing housing need, and over-estimation of population in certain age groups could drive targets in a different direction to local priorities.

Mr Allen asked how confident the council was that adopting the 2014 Standard Method in the Local Plan, without question or modification, would lead to a sound plan that balances properly the local need for houses in the next decades against protection of Dorset’s “cherished countryside and green spaces”.

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