Fareham can show only 2.99 years of housing land against a five-year requirement, on its own July 2026 figures. What that changes for applications near you.

The most important planning number in Fareham right now is 2.99. That is how many years of deliverable housing land the borough council says it can demonstrate, against a legal requirement to show five, in its own Calculation of Five-Year Housing Land Supply published in July 2026 with a base date of 1 April 2026.

That single figure does more to shape what gets built near you than the Local Plan does, because a council that cannot show five years loses much of its ability to refuse housing on land it never allocated.

How the borough gets to 2.99 years

The council’s own arithmetic, from that report:

Homes
Annual requirement in the adopted Local Plan 653
Under-delivery, 2021/22 to 2025/26 1,018
Five-year requirement (653 × 5, plus the shortfall) 4,283
20% buffer, applied because the borough failed the Housing Delivery Test 857
Total requirement, 1 Apr 2026 to 31 Mar 2031 5,140
Deliverable supply over the same five years 3,072
Shortfall -2,068

Divide the 3,072 homes of supply by the 1,028 a year the borough now needs and you get 2.99 years. Note what has happened to the annual figure: the Local Plan asks for 653 a year, but once past under-delivery and the buffer are added, the effective rate becomes 1,028 a year, well over half as much again.

The 20% buffer is not a choice. The Housing Delivery Test results published in December 2024 showed Fareham had delivered 421 homes against a target of 762 over the three years to March 2023, 55% of what was required. Anything below 85% triggers the buffer.

Five years of missing the target

Fareham Local Plan housing requirement against net completions, 2021/22 to 2025/26 Grouped bar chart comparing Fareham's Local Plan housing requirement with net completions for five years. 2021/22 requirement 210, completions 162. 2022/23 requirement 210, completions 144. 2023/24 requirement 653, completions 244. 2024/25 requirement 653, completions 357. 2025/26 requirement 653, provisional completions 454. Cumulative shortfall 1,018 homes. Fareham has not hit its housing target once since the plan was adopted Local Plan 2037 requirement against net completions, borough of Fareham. Source: Fareham Borough Council, Calculation of Five-Year Housing Land Supply, July 2026. 200 400 600 0 210162 2021/22 210144 2022/23 653244 2023/24 653357 2024/25 653454* 2025/26 Local Plan requirement Net completions Cumulative shortfall: 1,018 homes * 2025/26 completions are provisional and not yet submitted to MHCLG. The requirement was stepped: 210 a year for the first two years, then 653. Chart by Fareham News.
Chart by Fareham News. The step up in 2023/24 is deliberate: the Local Plan set a low requirement for its first two years, then raised it.

Delivery is improving. Completions have gone 162, 144, 244, 357 and a provisional 454 over the five years, so the borough is building at roughly three times the 2022/23 rate. It is still short every year, and the arithmetic compounds: each year’s shortfall is added to the next five-year requirement.

What a shortfall changes for you

Where a council cannot demonstrate five years of supply, national policy tilts the balance in favour of granting housing permission. In plain terms:

  • Applications on land the Local Plan did not allocate become harder to refuse. Policies that would normally restrict development in the countryside carry less weight.
  • Appeals get more likely to succeed. Developers refused at committee have a stronger case at the Planning Inspectorate while the shortfall stands.
  • Fareham’s Strategic Gaps and Areas of Special Landscape Quality are still in the plan, and still weigh in decisions, but they are being weighed against a policy presumption that now runs the other way.

If a site near you has been quiet for years and suddenly has an application on it, this is usually why.

Welborne: 6,000 homes, and about a sixth of them in five years

Welborne Garden Village, north of the M27 at Knowle, is the borough’s answer to all of the above. Outline permission (P/17/0266/OA) was granted on 30 September 2021 for up to 6,000 homes.

Progress since then has been about codes and reserved matters rather than building:

  • The Strategic Design Code and the Welborne Streets Manual were both approved in 2024.
  • Three neighbourhood design codes have been approved, two in 2024 and one in February 2026.
  • Reserved matters for the first phases, Dashwood, Chesterfield and the Village Centre, were approved through 2024.
  • The master developer provided a revised delivery trajectory in March 2026, which is what the council’s supply figures now use.

On that trajectory, Welborne contributes about 969 homes to the 2026 to 2031 five-year period: roughly 111 from Phase 3a Dashwood, 210 from Dashwood, 143 from Chesterfield, 71 from the Village Centre and 434 from the wider outline permission. That is close to a third of the borough’s entire deliverable supply coming from one site, and it is still only a sixth of what Welborne will eventually hold.

The junction that makes it work, the £100m-plus M27 junction 10 rebuild, is due to open in winter 2026. Progress on that is on our roadworks and travel page.

The other sites carrying the five years

Outside Welborne, the largest contributors to the 2026 to 2031 supply are spread across the borough:

  • Land south of Romsey Avenue, Portchester, 225 homes
  • Land south of Longfield Avenue, Fareham, 150 homes (outline)
  • Land south of Funtley Road, Funtley, 125 homes
  • Warsash Maritime Academy, 110 homes
  • Land east of Brook Lane and west of Lockswood Road, Warsash, 109 homes
  • Land at Heath Road, Locks Heath, 70 homes (outline, reserved matters under consideration)
  • 100 Wickham Road, Fareham, 54 homes, and Admiral House and Nicholson Gate, High Street, 39 homes, both in the town centre

Small sites of one to four homes add another 163, and the council allows a windfall of 50 a year in years four and five.

At committee this month

Fareham’s Planning Committee meets on Wednesday 12 August 2026 at 2pm in the Collingwood Room at the Civic Offices, with two applications listed, both brought to committee because of the number of objections:

Redoubt Court, Fort Fareham Road (P/26/0553/FP). The applicant is Fareham Borough Council itself. It proposes demolishing two blocks containing eight flats, now empty, and building 21 homes: 18 apartments and three houses, with parking, private amenity space and open space improvements. The site sits between Fort Fareham, a Grade II listed structure and Scheduled Ancient Monument, and HMS Collingwood across Longfield Avenue. It also needs a footpath through the middle of the site stopped up and diverted, which requires the committee’s approval separately under section 257 of the Town and Country Planning Act 1990. Officers recommend approval subject to further comments from the highway authority and the lead local flood authority, with conditions including ten integrated bat features and ten swift bricks in the new building.

Chestnut Paddocks, 221 Titchfield Road (P/26/0249/FP). A retrospective application to change the use of land to mixed equestrian and residential caravan use for a single traveller family, with two static caravans. The site is in the countryside outside the settlement boundary, within a designated Strategic Gap and Area of Special Landscape Quality. A static caravan there already had a three-year temporary permission from 2022 for an equine worker. Officers recommend granting permission, subject to conditions.

How to follow the planning record yourself

Fareham is not on the Idox system most councils use, so the usual public access URLs do not exist here. Two places to look instead:

  • The council’s case tracker to search applications by reference, address or ward.
  • The weekly lists, published as documents, for everything validated in the past week. This is the one to check if you want to know about an application near you before your neighbours do.
  • Committee agendas and minutes for what is going to a decision in public, usually published about a week ahead.

Comments on an application have to arrive before the decision is made, and on most applications that window is 21 days from validation.

More Fareham local information: house prices, trains to London, roadworks and travel and things to do in Fareham.

Sources