The Strategic Housing Land Availability Assessment (SHLAA) is an annual assessment of land suitable for residential development that the Council expects to deliver housing over the next 15 years or more. The Council also produce a Five-Year Supply Statement which assesses the number of houses the Council expects to be built in the next five years against the requirement set by Government.
The sites are in three categories:
- Sites that were under construction on 31 March 2022,
- Sites that had planning permission on this date but where construction hadn’t yet started,
- Sites that did not have planning permission on this date but do have the potential to be developed for housing, called capacity sites (inclusion of a site in this category does not guarantee that it will receive planning permission.)
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How the Council uses the SHLAA
We update the SHLAA on an annual basis.
We use the SHLAA to demonstrate whether we have a ‘five year housing land supply’. A five year land supply means that we can identify sites, which are expected to come forward within five years from the SHLAA base date, to meet Manchester’s local housing need for that period. In the case of the 2022 SHLAA, the data shows that there are sufficient deliverable sites to meet Manchester’s local housing need for the period April 2022 to March 2027.
The SHLAA will form part of the evidence base for Manchester’s Local Plan and also other frameworks and strategies, by showing which areas within the city have the capacity to accommodate new housing. Infrastructure providers and policy documents will be able to plan for this. In addition, the SHLAA can be used by developers wanting to find suitable sites for development in Manchester.
The SHLAA data is submitted to the Greater Manchester Combined Authority each year, to help with the preparation of the Places for Everyone Joint Plan.
Headline Statistics
- On 31 March 2022 there were 17,469 homes in the planning pipeline (i.e these are developments which on this date had planning permission that had not expired). A little over half of these homes were on sites that were already under construction at that point.
- In addition to the dwellings with planning permission, the SHLAA identifies the potential for a further 52,000 homes in Manchester. This makes 69,469 dwellings in total.
- We think that 64,146 of these homes will be built by March 31 2039 – within the ‘plan period’ for Manchester’s emerging new Local Plan.
- We think that 25,910 homes will be built within the next five years.
- 85% of the homes likely to be built by 2039 are flats and 15% will be houses.
- Most of the homes likely to be built by 2039 will be in the city centre and city centre fringe area (66%).
Residential completions
The SHLAA does not report on residential completions so completed sites are not shown on the map, but there were 3,972 dwellings completed in Manchester in 2021/22 across 139 sites. 450 of these were houses (11%) and 3,522 were flats (89%). 3,585 of the completed dwellings were on brownfield land (90%) and 387 were on greenfield land (10%).
There were 13 residential demolitions in 2021/22, giving a net completions figure of 3,959 dwellings once the demolitions are taken off.