An extra 2,500 new homes will need to be built in the Mansfield district by 2030 as part of fresh government targets.
Mansfield District Council is facing pressure to find space for development as part of a national drive to build more housing.
The Labour-run authority must now find room for developers to build 495 new houses per year over the next five years under the government’s national housing target, as part of the Local Development Scheme (LDS).
The impact of the scheme on the area was discussed at the council’s Overview and Scrutiny Committee on Tuesday, 29 January.
The minimum housing target was 295 last year, which has now increased to 495 this year, or 2,475 over five years.
Tracey Tucker, Mansfield District Council’s Planning Policy Team Leader, said: “There is a big increase in the amount of land that we need to find for housing.
“There is pressure to meet that figure and find land supply over five years. Once our plan gets to five years old, we will have to use that figure to prove that we have enough land for developments to come forward.”
The increase came about after the government changed the standard methodology used to calculate each local planning authority’s minimum housing target.
The government has set a national housing target of delivering 300,000 new homes in England per year by the mid-2020s.
Councils across the country must now identify enough sites in their local plans to deliver at least five years’ worth of housing to meet their local housing need.
According to documents, Mansfield must now deliver more houses, initially increasing from a minimum target of 259 per year to 540 per year. An objection by the council dropped this figure to 495.
The Labour-run authority will now decide which areas will be used for development and which green spaces will be protected.
The council will submit the up-to-date plan to the Secretary of State in June 2026.
Ms Tucker said: “It is a tight and challenging timeframe; it is a lot of work to fit in. We are moving the plan along rather than starting a new one from scratch.”
The council will also use artificial intelligence (AI) for public consultation rounds, adding that it has ‘tight timescales’ to make decisions.
Councillor Jacob Denness (Lab) asked Ms Tucker how the council is using AI to increase efficiency.
She explained: “We get thousands of comments back from the public, and we need to quickly be able to summarise them and get them on board for the next stage.
“It takes a lot of time to go through them all. We’ve been trialling a system where we can send off the comments to AI, and it summarises them all before sending them back to us.
“It saves us a great deal of time.”
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