Dwelling Potential

To ensure we continue to meet the city’s housing requirements we monitor the number of homes that are under construction and the number with planning permission that have not yet been built. This indicates what could be built in the years ahead.

Dwellings in the development pipeline

Number of dwellings under construction graph [330KB]

Time series under construction data table [80KB]

The number of dwellings under construction has been falling sharply since peak levels of 1,613 dwellings in 2007. However, the number of dwellings under construction in 2011 shows a 50 per cent increase over the previous year. This is attributable mainly to the progression of sites at Mount Wise, Southway, Devonport, Plymouth Airport and Plympton Cattle Market. In the year 2010 to 2011 work started on 777 dwellings which is over twice the number in the two previous years.

It is too early to say whether this is an indication of the beginning of recovery in the housing market as national intelligence from the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors (RICS) and the Council of Mortgage Lenders (CML) give no indication of recovery of the national housing market.

Number of dwellings with planning permissions but not started graph [250KB]

Time series with planning permission data table [76KB]

The number of sites that have planning permission but have not started is still decreasing. However with 3,884 dwellings yet to start and 703 dwellings under construction Plymouth has considerable potential for future residential development, despite the impact of the recession.

This page of the annual monitoring report was last updated December 2011.