As housing targets rise sharply, the big question is not how many homes can be built, but when and if the infrastructure the developments need will be in place
The questions everyone asks when a new housing development is proposed are: Where are the schools? Where is the health provision? How will the roads cope? What about public transport?
Change is more than housing
Since 2019, more than 8,000 houses have been built in the Dorset Council area. That’s between 1,400 and 1,900 homes per year according to the latest performance data from October 2025, when Dorset was meeting the required supply of 1,700 homes a year.
All that has changed. The Government has set new guidelines, and Dorset now needs 3,246 homes a year, almost double what it was delivering. The higher target has been set by central government rather than Dorset Council. But if we’re doubling housebuilding, are we doubling infrastructure too?
The population of the Dorset Council area is expected to rise by 5% in the next ten years, largely due to the increase in housing. However, there’s also an anticipated 2.3% annual increase in the over 65s – which has significant implications for health and social care, public transport and access to local services.
Meanwhile, the number of children aged 0-15 is expected to fall by around 6,500. That raises an obvious question: if Dorset’s population is getting older as it grows, should new infrastructure look different too?
Housing numbers are easy to find. Understanding whether the supporting infrastructure is keeping pace is much harder. GP performance, transport data and population forecasts are all published separately, making it difficult to build a complete picture.
So who makes the decisions on what is required when a planning development is proposed?
A Dorset Council spokesperson told Dorset Life that planning applications are assessed in consultation with specialist teams covering highways, education, ecology, flood risk, environmental health and social care, together with external organisations including National Highways, the Environment Agency, Natural England, utility providers and local health authorities. Infrastructure requirements are then assessed against Local Plan policies for each development.
Harder questions to solve
There are examples where infrastructure has been delivered alongside housing. Gillingham School has a new synthetic pitch, Poundbury has a new primary school, and Gillingham’s £6.31 million Pavement Street link road is designed to serve the 900-home development south of the town.
But all this comes when the £200 million capital budget at Dorset Council is under review and the local authority increasingly sees the infrastructure programmes as ‘aspirational’.
The examples are all welcome, but they do not answer the wider question. For example, how much additional heavy traffic can a small market town cope with? Just look at the bridges at Durweston and Manston to see the damage they are suffering from heavier traffic. Another difficult infrastructure question is the A357 and its passage through Stalbridge, Henstridge and Templecombe. With the recent major increase in housing developments in the villages and the through traffic from other areas, many residents question whether the road can cope with yet more vehicles.
Substantial housing is proposed in Dorset’s larger ’Tier 3’ villages, regardless of limited services and poor public transport.
Although these challenging issues are continually kicked into the long grass, with the prospect of so much additional housing, sooner or later there will have to be a robust conversation.
Where are the funds spent?
Is the Community Infrastructure Levy paid by developers going to the right place?
Dorset Council says developer contributions are limited by what individual developments can realistically afford. Infrastructure is funded through a mixture of Section 106 agreements – negotiated payments from the developer for each planning application, to be spent for the benefit of the affected community – and the Community Infrastructure Levy (CIL), where it applies. The council says these contributions rarely cover the full cost of the infrastructure required, meaning additional funding often has to be found elsewhere. North Dorset currently relies more heavily on Section 106 agreements because it did not adopt CIL before local government reorganisation. A county-wide levy is scheduled to be included in the new Local Plan.
While North Dorset currently receives section 106 monies for local initiatives such as village halls and play parks, perhaps the time has come to change the rules, be more strategic and pool some of the S106 money into a wider levy so it’s more in keeping with the rest of the county.
But would the money then stay in North Dorset, or be absorbed into a general fund for county-wide issues?
Building houses is relatively straightforward. Building the roads, schools, GP surgeries and transport links that allow communities to thrive is considerably harder.
As Dorset prepares for almost twice as many new homes each year as before, many residents believe that the conversation around creating the infrastructure to service the new housing needs to happen before the houses are built, not afterwards.
