Issue - meetings

The report of the scrutiny task group – Joint Core Strategy and Liaison Working Group on Household formation rates will be presented by Councillor Tim Harman as the chair of the group. The O&S committee are asked to satisfy themselves that the terms of reference have been met and endorse the recommendations before they are forwarded to the JCS joint member steering group for consideration at their meeting on 31 January 2013.

(30 mins) 

The chair reminded the committee that their remit was to receive the report of the scrutiny task group and ensure that the task group had completed the task set by Council and met their terms of reference.  It was not within the remit of the committee to get into the detail of the contentious points but he would allow time for members to ask questions. The consultant from the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research (CCHPR) was on the conference phone so would be able to listen to the debate and respond to any technical questions.

 The chair invited Councillor Tim Harman, as the chair of the scrutiny task group - Joint Core Strategy and Liaison Working Group on household formation rates, to introduce their final report and recommendations.

In his introduction, Councillor Harman thanked the members, the two co-opted members from Gloucester City and Tewkesbury Borough Council and officers for their contribution to this review. He referred to the background to this review set out in section 2 of the task report and he stressed the importance of a local authority ensuring that housing requirement figures set out in their local plan are soundly rooted in a robust evidence base.  The project brief set for the working group had challenging timescales but they had maximised the time available. They had considered a final report from the Cambridge Centre for Housing and Planning Research (CCHPR) on 14 January 2013 which had examined a whole range of issues including the important factors of changes with regard to young people and an ageing population and the economic climate. The working group concluded that there were no material errors in the way in which the DCLG household representative rates had been applied and they didn’t find any significant reason for deviating from them hence their recommendations set out in 9.1. He considered the working group had produced a sound report and the recommendations would support the council in ensuring it had the sound evidence base that was needed. He informed members that Councillor Bickerton, as a member of the working group, had not supported their report and presented some alternative evidence on household size predictions which he wished to present to the committee.

Councillor Bickerton said he was happy with the work undertaken and it had provided lots of valid data but he did not consider that the work was complete. He referred to the graph on JCS District Average Household Size Compared to National Trend he had produced that had been circulated at the start of the meeting. At the task group meeting on 14 January he had presented an earlier version of this graph which had resulted in an action to verify some of the data used by CCHPR. Since then he had been in discussion with the Office of National Statistics and Neil McDonald from CCHPR had assisted him in correcting some of the earlier district figures he had used to produce the graph presented at the task  ...  view the full minutes text for item 7