What exactly is Aireborough’s housing need?   Does Leeds City Council know?  Where has the Leeds housing target for Aireborough of 2,300 come from?   Is that number right?  What about all the houses Aireborough has had built in the last few years?

These are some of the first questions to ask;  as house building plans start with a calculation of Housing Need between 2012 and 2028.

City Wide Targets

Leeds have said the need for the whole City is 74,000 new households – that is local need, and people coming to live in the area for work. (Yes, that is despite an ONS projection or more like 40,000 – LCC are expecting a lot of job growth!!)

They then take 4,000 from that number to come to the new housing target – (they say 4,000 houses will be demolished and rebuilt).   So,  that is where the new housing target of 70,000 comes from.

Then they take another, 4,000 houses off that to get the number of housing sites needed – (they expect 4,000 brownfield ‘windfall’ sites to ‘appear’ in the timescale).  So, that  leaves a target for housing sites of 66,000.

Aireborough  Housing Targets

The target is our proportion of the 66,000 figure.  It was calculated in 2009/2010, in the Strategic Housing Market Assessment (SHMA) which you will find here.   It was not calculated based on the need of our local population.   It was calculated by taking housing demand in previous years and projecting that forward.  Unfortunately for Aireborough,  as we had a number of houses built on brownfield mill and factory sites, over the preceding years, that level of building was forecast forward as our housing need figure.  There is a difference between the housing need of a population,  and housing supply and demand.

The compilers of the report,  GVA and Edge Analytics,  did say that this method of forecasting could only be ‘indicative’, as it was “heavily shaped by historic provision of supply”,   they warned that the calculations did not work at the Housing Market Characteristic Areas (HMCA) level as a true figure of what was needed.

Leeds City Council,  do say in their Core Strategy that the HMCA housing targets is ‘indicative’ (4.6.18, page 36). But,  somehow,  that seems to have translated now,  into a statement of ‘the HMCA targets are set in stone‘, and you MUST find land for them !!

Aireborough Housing Needs Survey

So,  the Forum, has set out to find out what Aireborough’s housing needs actually are – so we can get to the bottom of this argument.   We would,  therefore,  ask you to complete this housing needs survey, which has been adapted from one that we know has produced reliable information in other areas of the country.

Housing Needs Survey here

If you could download it, complete it, and send it to ANDF, c/o  16 Fieldhead Drive, Guiseley, West Yorkshire LS20 8DZ.  Or you should be able to fill it out electronically (fill and sign on right hand side of pdf reader)  or you can scan it and send it back electronically.  Or if you email aireboroughnp@gmail.com, we’ll arrange to pick it up.  We will also have the surveys available at our pop-up consultation days – the first one is the afternoon of 2nd October,  Morrisons Guiseley.

The Forum does rely on members and residents helping neighbours and friends,  so,  if you could also give a copy of this survey to people you know, that would be helpful.   We will weight the survey back to show a representative sample of the population.