Five-year housing land supply

Background

The National Planning Policy Framework requires all local planning authorities to identify and annually update a supply of specific deliverable sites sufficient to provide a minimum of five years' worth of housing against their housing requirement. This is also known as the five-year housing land supply.

The housing requirement used to determine the five-year supply must be that which is set out within adopted strategic policies, or against the Local Housing Need where the strategic policies are more than five years old.

The Local Housing Need is an unconstrained assessment of the minimum number of homes needed in an area. It must be calculated using the standard method, details of which are set out within Planning Practice Guidance. The standard method calculation was updated in December 2024 whereby changes were made to its inputs. If applied in West Berkshire, this would effectively double the council's annual housing need from 515 to 1,067 dwellings per annum.

However, the government has set out transitional arrangements within the NPPF. These state that where an adopted spatial development strategy is less than five years old, the housing requirement within that plan will be used as the benchmark for assessing both housing delivery and five-year housing land supply.

The recent adoption of the West Berkshire Local Plan Review (LPR) therefore provides the council with greater certainty over how housing delivery and supply will be measured for up to the next five years.

Current five-year housing land supply position

The LPR was adopted on 10 June 2025, and it supersedes in its entirety the West Berkshire Core Strategy (in addition to the Housing Site Allocations Development Plan Document and the West Berkshire District Local Plan 1991-2006 (Saved Policies 2007)). 

Strategic policy SP12 of the LPR contains the housing requirement, which is an average of 515 dwellings per year.

The council published an updated five-year housing land supply position in February 2026, which uses the housing requirement set out in the LPR.

The council can currently demonstrate a 5.7 years' supply of deliverable housing sites for the period 2025/26 to 2029/30, measured against the five-year requirement, including the 5% buffer.

The February 2026 housing land supply statement and its appendices are available to download below. This has been prepared in accordance with the NPPF and Planning Practice Guidance:

• Housing Land Supply Statement (February 2026) [216KB]
• Appendix 1: Schedule of Sites [845KB]
• Appendix 2: Site Deliverability Forms [5MB]