The evidence presented within the Issues and Options draft suggests a very limited active register of persons wishing to build their own property, when measured against the overall scale of housing need. Meeting the demand for self-build/custom-build is therefore highly unlikely to have any meaningful impact on housing delivery.

With that in mind, requiring a certain proportion of new homes on new housing allocations to be available for self or custom-build would be a disproportionate response to the issue. Moreover, it is often the case that those wishing to build their own home have particular locational aspirations, which are not compatible with individual plots on estates otherwise delivered by volume housebulders, irrespective of the quality of that environment. In addition, there are practical considerations relating to site management and delivery which mean having a separate single independent contractor working on a site otherwise managed by a major housebuilder is difficult to facilitate, and is likely to mean that any self/custom build plots only come forward after the main development is complete, thereby slowing down rather than speeding up delivery. If the Council is minded to have policies to specifically support self/custom build, then options B and C are more realistic than Option A.