Like the pain associated with any bank holiday journey, half term excursion and summer get away and those chippy voices from the back seats of the Skoda Octavia Estate (VRS 2.0 TSI 245PS DSG Wagon) querying when the final destination will be in sight – after 8 long and arduous years have we finally arrived at a spatial framework for the Greater Manchester region?

Started in 2014, and following numerous drafts and reworkings, including Mayor Andy Burnham’s radical rewrite to reduce Green Belt release and consequently housing numbers, Places for Everyone (PfE) has finally been submitted to the Secretary of State.

This reworked joint Development Plan Document for nine of the boroughs of Greater Manchester, following Stockport’s decision to go its own way, covers an area of over 115,000 hectares with close on 47% being designated as Green Belt.

But whilst it boasts some substantial numbers – 165,000 homes (50,000 affordable) and over 5 million sqm of employment space, can it meet future requirements in housing to support economic growth required across the region for the next 15 years?

In short; it will not. How can it?

New housing requirements for the region are twice as high as predicted and the situation is worsening. Five of the nine boroughs (Bolton, Bury, Oldham, Tameside and Trafford) have less than the minimum five years housing supply which includes three of the worst performing authorities in the country. And aside from whether any draft allocations have already been delivered and developed out, the plan was conceived years ago in different market conditions and against a very different residential and commercial backdrop. For a start it will be interesting to see how commercially viable many of these strategic sites now are.

In Manchester alone, some commentators believe that the London housing crisis has been rebuilt in Manchester with the shortage of affordable housing starting to mirror that of the capital.

There is not one up to date Local Plan within the Greater Manchester region and whilst local planning authorities will have the comfort of having strategic guidance in place and in theory claim a 5-year housing supply, in practice most will still be operating under a ‘presumption in favour of sustainable development’.

That’s not to say PfE isn’t a plan for the future. Despite, like most development plans, being effectively out of date on adoption, the plan does espouse policies to support the ambition to be a carbon neutral city region by 2038, including promoting accessible and adaptable homes, planning for a digital-enabled, green city region, supporting wider strategies for clean air, walking and cycling and promoting the delivery of key infrastructure and utilities.

So we have finally negotiated what seems to have been a never ending route (much like the A16 to Skegness) to a spatial strategy for the GM region, but was it all worth it? Lots of questions remain, not least how and whether PfE will address the ongoing housing, and for that fact employment, land supply and delivery issues that currently appear to be going more or less unchecked.