§ Lord Stallardasked Her Majesty's Government:
What progress they have made in obtaining an assessment of the amount of previously developed land available for housing, announced in the policy document, Planning for the Communities of the Future, on 23 February. [HL1986]
§ The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (Baroness Hayman)The Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions (DETR) has worked with the Local Government Management Board, English Partnerships, Ordnance Survey and local authorities to establish a method of providing a consistent assessment of previously developed land which may be available for housing or other development as the first step towards a complete land use database for England.
Key features of the approach are to meet the needs of a number of organisations form a single data collection exercise, and to use information already held by the local authorities wherever possible, to avoid duplication of effort. Local authorities will be asked to draw up a list of previously developed sites along with information about the location, area, planning status and other relevant characteristics of each site. This will be done to a common format and using standard definitions that will be set out in guidance being developed jointly by DETR, Local Government Management Board, English Partnerships and Ordnance Survey following consultation with a number of local authorities. English 159WA Partnerships will contract teams of surveyors which will visit each local authority to complete the data collection and to collect additional information about certain sites on the potential for redevelopment. Ordnance Survey will provide quality assurance on the geographical attributes of the data, and develop the list of sites into a map database showing the site boundaries. Ordnance Survey will also develop a plan for extending the coverage of the database to other land uses, and for keeping the resulting National Land Use Database up to date.
Data collection will start in the summer. English Partnerships intends to publish information on an initial set of sites suitable for redevelopment by the end of the year; summary results for all sites should be available by March 1999. Meanwhile, local authorities will have consistent information on the amounts of previously developed land which may be available for housing to assist in the drawing up of national and regional targets for the reuse of land.
The database will also have value for other organisations. For example, officials are discussing with Urban Mines, an environmental NGO, which launches its own brownfield sites project today, to ensure the two projects are complementary. The intention is to secure agreements to make the information more widely available, including appropriate charging for commercial use.
We shall be discussing this work as it progresses with the Urban Task Force.