What is the Housing Delivery Test (HDT)?
The Housing Delivery Test (HDT) is an annual measurement of housing delivery to assess the extent to which each local authority is building enough homes to meet their housing need, as determined by Central Government. Local planning authorities are required to submit housing delivery statistics for their authority area, with the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) assessing housing delivery performance against housing requirements over a rolling three-year period. For further information, please refer to the links in Related Content, which include both the most recent (2023) HDT and a record of historic tests.
What is a Housing Delivery Test (HDT) Action Plan?
Where there has been under-delivery (currently defined as under 95% of the Council’s housing requirement) of housing over the previous three years, a HDT Action Plan must be prepared. This provides an analysis of the key factors that have contributed to this. It provides information on what the Council will do to proactively increase housing delivery and what actions it should take going forward to improve the availability of land for housing, support development opportunities and ultimately increase delivery.
The Government have proposed that the HDT is used as a monitoring tool to demonstrate whether local areas are building enough homes to meet their housing need. It was formally introduced in the revised National Planning policy Framework (NPPF), published in July 2018 and most recently updated in December 2024 (Paragraph 79). Councils that fail to meet delivery rate targets are required to take appropriate action to address under-delivery. In 2020, Rochford District Council was required to produce an Action Plan. This is available in the ‘Related Content’ section on this page.
Note – the Council was assessed to have passed the HDT in the most recent (2023) HDT (see link in Related Content).