Emerging themes and ideas: Housing

Housing Working Group: What the group has learned so far

The population of Shipston in 2011 was 5038, housed in 2405 dwellings.[nbsp] The number of houses in the town doubled between 1981 and 2011 – an average increase of nearly 40 new homes every year.[nbsp] This was the fastest rate of housing development anywhere in Warwickshire: 2½ times the rate of house building in the county as a whole.[nbsp] It is generally agreed that the provision of educational and medical facilities in Shipston, and improvements to the road and public transport systems, has not kept pace with this rapid rate of growth.

Stratford District Council’s submitted Core Strategy (which will go through an Examination-in-Public in January) proposes that Shipston should provide 235 of the 11,300 new homes that the Council calculates are needed in the District between 2011 and 2031.[nbsp] However, the actual level of housing growth in Shipston is likely to exceed this figure due to existing applications, permissions and appeals.[nbsp]

If all these schemes (totalling around 660 units) were to go ahead, it is likely that the majority of them would have been completed by 2021.[nbsp] That would mean that Shipston could see a rate of housing development in the current decade averaging over 60 homes a year, far exceeding that of the previous 30 years.[nbsp] In addition, redevelopment and ‘windfall’ sites are likely to continue to become available within the existing built up area during the plan period, some of which would be most suited to small-scale housing development.