HOUSEBUILDING targets in Somerset could be cut by about 15,000 homes as the creation of the county’s new local plan moves forward.

Somerset Council is currently assessing feedback from a first round of public consultation on its plan, which will come into force in the spring of 2029.

The new plan was originally expected to deliver nearly 75,000 houses by 2045, a rate of 3,600 per year, in light of the Government’s steep increase in local authority housing targets.

But, council officers have now indicated they may reduce the scope of the plan from 20 years to 16, reducing the need to allocate such a large number of new sites.

Planning policy service manager Kate Murdoch said councillors would decide before Christmas on potentially changing the scope of the local plan.

Ms Murdoch said: “We will be bringing a decision paper to this committee on December 9, setting out the advantages and disadvantages of shortening the local plan period.”

The council will publish a summary of the first round of public consultation by the end of this month, shortly after a final ‘call for sites’ concludes.

More than 800 residents responded to the consultation, of which 96 per cent were white, 71 per cent were aged 55 or older, and 19 per cent identified as disabled.

The next round of public consultation will ask for feedback on specific sites which have been allocated for housing and is currently scheduled to take place between September 10 and October 29 next year, several months after the May local elections.

A final round of consultation will then take place from March to April, 2028, shortly before the election of a first Wessex regional mayor, before the finished draft local plan is submitted to the Planning Inspectorate in September that year.

Issues with the housing numbers were raised with councillors by local government and environmental campaigner David Orr, who argued previous efforts by Government to drive housing growth through higher targets had fallen short of delivering what was needed.

Mr Orr said: “This is a warning that setting a top-down housing target does not guarantee that homes will be delivered in the real-world.

“Recent history exposes the gulf between top-down housing targets and actual delivery.

“Builders do not build houses to Government diktat by spreadsheet.

“They respond to demand, sales rates, infrastructure costs, and profitability.

“Allocating land for forecast housing does not guarantee that homes will be built when or where Government expects.”

Under revised housing targets from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG), Somerset is expected to deliver 74,920 homes over 20 years from 2025 to 2045, an average of 3,746 homes per year, or slightly more than 10 a day.

Mr Orr said building on such scale was ‘substantially beyond what the real world will support’ and would cause ‘permanent damage across rural Somerset’.

He said: “My concern is that a very large allocation over 20 years will favour whichever sites offer developers the highest commercial returns.

“They will come forward straight away.”