area and the assessment is approved by the Welsh Ministers, the authority has a duty to exercise its powers to meet those needs under section 103 of the H(W)A 2014.
(ii) General “needs” assessments
195. For many years there has been an obligation on local authorities to carry out an assessment of the accommodation needs of Gypsies and Travellers when carrying out their periodic review of housing needs under section 8 of the Housing Act 1985.
196. This obligation was first imposed by section 225 of the Housing Act 2004. This measure was repealed by section 124 of the Housing and Planning Act 2016. Instead, the duty of local housing authorities in England to carry out a periodic review of housing needs under section 8 of the Housing Act 1985 has since 2016 included (at section 8(3)) a duty to consider the needs of people residing in or resorting to their district with respect to the provision of sites on which caravans can be stationed.
(iii) Planning policy
197. Since about 1994, and with the repeal of the statutory duty to provide sites, the general issue of Traveller site provision has come increasingly within the scope of planning policy, just as the government anticipated.
198. Indeed, in 1994, the government published planning advice on the provision of sites for Gypsies and Travellers in the form of Department of the Environment Circular 1/94 entitled “ Gypsy sites and planning ”. This explained that the repeal of the statutory duty to provide sites was expected to lead to more applications for planning permission for sites. Local Planning Authorities (“LPAs”) were advised to assess the needs of Gypsies and Travellers within their areas and to produce a plan which identified suitable locations for sites (location-based policies) and if this could not be done, to explain the criteria for the selection of appropriate locations (criteria-based policies). Unfortunately, despite this advice, most attempts to secure permission for Gypsy and Traveller sites were refused and so the capacity of the relatively few sites authorised for occupation by these nomadic communities continued to fall well short of that needed, as Lord Bingham explained in South Bucks District Council v Porter , at para 13. 199. The system for local development planning in England is now established by the Planning and Compulsory Purchase Act 2004 (“PCPA 2004”) and the regulations made under it. Part 2 of the PCPA 2004 deals with local development and stipulates that the LPA is to prepare a development scheme and plan; that this must set out the authority’s policies; that in preparing the local development plan, the authority must have regard to national policy; that each plan must be sent to the Secretary of State for independent
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