The councillor in charge of planning at Warwick District Council insists little could have been done to prevent its "vulnerable" position on housing. 

The district's planning committee now has less power to refuse development plans after an inspector ruled it had overestimated the probable delivery of new homes over the next five years.

Authorities in charge of planning must be able to demonstrate a five-year land supply – sufficient land to build enough new homes, plus the probability that they will come forward in that timeframe – for local plans that lay out where development should take place to carry full weight. 

During an appeal over a housing application in Leek Wootton in May, national inspector Steve Lee ruled that the authority, which handles planning decisions across Warwick, Leamington Spa, Kenilworth and Whitnash, could not evidence the number of homes it said would be built out over the next five years on 14 different sites allocated for housing.

It means developers that put in plans for alternative plots of land will get "a presumption in favour of sustainable development", making them easier to push through unless there are other material planning reasons to refuse.

The council had conceded that it had fallen slightly short but Mr Lee's reductions left it with a 4.01-year supply and acknowledging that it was "likely" to be behind the curve "for a period of time".

Cllr Chris King is the district's portfolio holder for place, a role that includes overseeing planning policy.

He told the Local Democracy Reporting Service: "It has evolved through constant difficulties with building companies bringing forward plans, being able to unlock sites that need to be unlocked, the whole nature of it.

"Particularly having been through a protracted spell of inflation, interest rate variations, housing market fluctuation, it has meant that builders are less able to sell houses at the moment. All of these things affect housing land supply.

"It is a situation that we regret, of course, no planning authority wants to be in this situation.

"All we can do is prepare our planning committee and make sure they understand the bigger picture when an application comes in, and do our best to guide those applications towards the places we want them, not only in relation to the local plan but the new South Warwickshire Local Plan (a combined development plan being created to cover the districts of Warwick and Stratford-on-Avon) which is coming together at pace.

"It is tricky. Everyone knows that if you lose that supply it means developers can have a look and are much more able to put you under pressure to allow the applications to go through, we just have to deal with that as best we can."

While planning authorities must deliver on housing targets, they are also at the mercy of developers building once plans are approved. 

Cllr King added: "It would be really helpful if there were some mechanism through which there is a time element when a developer brings forward a site.

"We have sites in our local plan that have just not been developed for many years and they are part of our supply. At the moment we can't prove that anything is happening and we can't do anything about that, we are just waiting on the whim of that developer or their arrangement with another house builder.

"If it is down to the market, there is nothing we can do about that either."

It leads to the question of what the council can do, one Cllr King was keen to offer hope over. 

"We will use all the experience we have, and the relationships we have with developers to try to mitigate our exposure," he said.

"That amounts to quite a lot. Planning and development is a two-way thing, they need us and we need them. 

"There will be more conversations around it, I am not happy at all to be in this vulnerable situation but we are not alone, the problems are national, we just have to do the best we can to get around them.

"It might be that interest in development morphs into the core sites on the South Warwickshire Local Plan because there is a much wider acceptance that development is needed for employment land and infrastructure.

"It could help soften the direct impact. By Christmas and new year, there will be preferred options (for sites to develop) coming forward."