Authority Monitoring Report 2022 to 2023

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 below. These replace the legacy district council areas and will be referred to in this way within this report:

• Aylesbury is the North & Central Areas;
• Chiltern is the East Area;
• South Bucks is the South Area; and
• Wycombe is the West Area.

Buckinghamshire is a relatively constrained authority in terms of Green Belt and the Chilterns National Landscape. 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 National Landscape 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 Chilterns National Landscape 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.

In Buckinghamshire the population has increased by 9.5%, from 505,300 in 2011 to 553,000 in 2021, according to the 2021 ONS census data. This is higher than the overall population increase for England in the same period of 6.6%. The south is densely populated, and the north is more sparsely, 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. There has been an increase of 23.2% in people aged 65 years and over, an increase of 6.4% in people aged 15 to 64 years, and an increase of 7.9% in children aged under 15 years. For more see ONS census 2021 data.