Authority Monitoring Report 2023 to 2024

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
• 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, M25 and M4 motorways, 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 with a new station under construction at Winslow. HS2 and EWR cross at Calvert in the north of the county. With the exception of EWR and the Elizabeth line, transport links north to south are generally superior to those which traverse the county from east to west.

In Buckinghamshire, there is a population of 553,000 people in 2021 (2021 ONS Census), which is an increase by 9.5%, from 505,300 in. This is higher than the overall population increase of 6.6% for England over the same period. 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.