Population Projections
From recently published Welsh Government statistics the population of Wrexham County Borough between 2018 and 2028 is predicted to fall by 963 persons. This fall in population is a long way from the 9,011 increase in population that the Wrexham Council Planning Dept have been predicting since the submission of their Local Development Plan (LDP) to the WG for the inspection in public hearings. This throws a big spanner in the works of the massive housing developments being proposed by the Council, there is clearly no justification for building a large number of houses.
Even before the publication of the WG statistics and during the LDP public hearings the Rossett Focus Group have presented evidence that undermined the Wrexham Planning Dept assumptions on population growth. The latest WG statistics give 3 possible variants on population growth – Principle, Lower and Higher.
In previous statistics the WG also gave a variant based on Ten Year Average Migration which showed the highest predicted growth figures, but this has now been dropped. It was this Ten Year Av Migration that Wrexham Council Planning Dept adopted!
Sources:
Welsh Government Household Projections
Welsh Government Population Projections
The graph above shows the actual population of Wrexham between 2014 and 2019 (green) compared to the Councils prediction (red). The new WG predictions are also shown for comparison.
Between 2018 and 2028 the population of Wrexham is expected to decrease by 963 whilst the number of households is expected to increase by 989, the average persons per household being 2.23 at the end of this period. These figures indicate that less than 100 new homes per year are required to meet the demand. This is a long way from the 516 new houses per year proposed by the Council in their LDP document BP08 – Housing Supply and Delivery.
Conclusions
From these latest statistics it can be concluded that many Wrexham Councillors gave a more accurate prediction of housing requirements than the Wrexham Council Planning Dept! The Local Development Plan (LDP) in its current state is clearly unsound. This monumental failure in the production of a sound Local Development Plan must lie equally between the Welsh Governments Planning Depts abysmal statistics back in 2014 and the Wrexham Planning Dept inability to understand the declining local population based on the Councils own mid-year population statistics. It will be interesting to see what the LDP Planning Inspectors conclusions is are later this year.
It is now blatantly obvious that the Greenfield and Agricultural Best Most Versatile land grab proposed by the Wrexham Planning Dept is no longer required. Wrexham’s housing need can easily be accommodated on brownfield land.