Authority Monitoring Report 2020 to 2021

On 1 April 2020, the former District Council areas of Aylesbury Vale, Chiltern, South Bucks and Wycombe and Buckinghamshire County Council came together to form a single Unitary Authority, Buckinghamshire Council. Buckinghamshire Council is split into five planning committee areas (North, Central, East, West and South) as illustrated in Fig. 1. These replace the legacy district council areas and will be referred to in this way within this report:

• Aylesbury is North & Central Areas
• Chiltern is East Area
• South Bucks is South Area
• Wycombe is West Area

Buckinghamshire is a relatively constrained authority in terms of Green Belt and the Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty (AONB). The Green Belt was introduced to restrain the urban sprawl of London, prevent the merging of towns, and to safeguard the countryside and character of historic towns. Designated Green Belt covers 32% of Buckinghamshire Council’s area. The Chilterns AONB is a valued landscape and its designation is to conserve beauty through protecting flora, fauna and geological features. It covers 27% of the Buckinghamshire Council area. Both the Green Belt and AONB are significant planning constraints which affect the scale and types of development that can happen within these areas.

Buckinghamshire is well connected to the existing road and rail network, including the M40, London underground and national rail services which run north to south. High Speed Rail 2 (HS2) is under construction through the county, from London to Birmingham. East West Rail (EWR) is under construction to connect Oxford to Milton Keynes and Bedford. HS2 and EWR cross at Calvert in the north of the county.

Buckinghamshire has a fast growing population with a 0.6% annual change (between 2019-2020) according to the 2021 ONS report with a total population of 534,720. The south is densely populated, and the north is more sparse, however, there has been a particularly large population change in Aylesbury Vale which has seen a 10.4% rise since 2011, the highest rate of growth of any local authority in Great Britain. In terms of who make up this population, in recent years the general trend is an increasing amount of residents aged 0-15 as well as residents aged 80 and over. Buckinghamshire has an underrepresentation of people in their 20s and 30s (21.8 and 6.4 per cent below the national level).