Annie Gingell from planning consultancy Turley calls for urgent reforms in housing policy and planning to deliver more affordable homes.
Annie Gingell is an Associate Director at Turley and a national leader in affordable and specialist housing.
The housing crisis in England needs no introduction. For anyone working in planning, housing, or local government, the scale of the challenge is abundantly clear. What does bear repeating is how deeply this crisis is being felt in communities across the country, and how urgently we need solutions.
The Numbers Are Stark
Across England, more than 1.3 million households (not people) are on Housing Registers. These are not just statistics. They are real families, individuals, and key workers in towns and cities from Cornwall to Cumbria, struggling to find a secure, affordable place to live.
In most areas, demand consistently and significantly exceeds supply. In the South East for example many authorities in recent years have experienced net negative affordable housing delivery. Places like Castle Point and Basildon illustrate the issue well: large swathes of green belt, coupled with some of the oldest Local Plans in the country combine to create a near-impossible delivery environment.
The picture in cities isn’t much brighter. Bristol has over 21,000 households on its Housing Register, yet last year only 249 net new social homes were delivered. Less than 2% of those in need. The situation in Birmingham is even more stark. The city has overseen a net negative delivery of nearly 900 affordable homes since 2019, while the Housing Register has surged to 24,000 households.
The households on these registers are doing everything right. And yet, they are stuck. Unable to access social housing and unable to afford homeownership. Left in a precarious middle ground, where private rents are high, housing conditions are poor, and security is minimal.
A Symptom of Systemic Strain
This pressure is fuelling a sharp rise in temporary accommodation (TA). As of March 2024, almost 118,000 households (including over 132,000 children) were living in TA, with nearly one in five there for over five years. The word “temporary” is, for many, a fiction.
The human cost is devastating, but so is the financial. Councils spent at least £2.3 billion on TA last year, with only 4% of that going toward council or housing association owned homes. The vast majority was absorbed by private landlords, B&Bs, and nightly paid providers. At a time when many councils are teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, this is simply not sustainable.
Affordable Housing in Decision-Making
Affordable housing has long been established as a material planning consideration, but its importance is frequently underplayed in decision-making.
The recent Vistry judgment is a step forward. It makes clear that the weight given to affordable housing is a matter of planning judgment, which should be guided by key considerations such as the scale of need in an authority and any shortfall in delivery.
That matters. Too often, affordable housing is treated as a tick-box exercise in planning decisions. This ruling empowers officers and members to give real weight to schemes that deliver affordable homes. Not just when they exceed policy (without grant funding of course), but also when they meet it.
But good decisions require good evidence; and too often, that’s where the system begins to fall apart.
Flawed Evidence, Flawed Outcomes
The method for calculating overall housing need has shifted multiple times in recent years, including the comparatively radical approach of introducing a ‘standard method’ in 2018. In contrast the approach to assessing affordable housing need has remained largely static; relying on broad, inconsistently applied, and increasingly outdated guidance.
As a result, we now measure overall housing need and affordable housing need using entirely different metrics. The two are fundamentally disconnected. This creates major problems for plan-making and decision-taking, making it harder to robustly plan for affordable housing needs.
The flexibility in national guidance, intended to allow local adaptation based on local circumstances and the availability of data, has instead enabled wildly inconsistent approaches frequently driven by a reliance on incomplete or imperfect datasets. It is often used (intentionally or otherwise) to understate or distort the scale of affordable housing need. Some of the more problematic practices emerging include:
- Treating the private rented sector (PRS) as a substitute for affordable housing, despite it being a leading driver of homelessness.
- Excluding households receiving Local Housing Allowance (LHA) in the PRS from affordable need calculations, despite LHA often failing to cover rent costs or to provide access to safe, decent accommodation.
- Applying affordability thresholds that allow households to spend a disproportionate amount of their gross income on housing, masking the extent of unaffordability.
- Managing down Housing Register numbers under the Localism Act (i.e., removing households from registers without addressing their needs).
- Assessing affordable homeownership need solely against First Homes price caps, ignoring other affordable homeownership tenures and the broader definition of need in national policy.
These methodological choices matter. They downplay the real scale of need, skewing what gets planned, what gets funded, and ultimately what gets built.
Clearer, firmer guidance on how to assess affordable housing need is urgently required. Until then, decision-makers must scrutinise evidence bases carefully, because if we start with flawed evidence, we will end with flawed outcomes.
Identifying Need Without Meeting It
Even when affordable housing need is properly assessed, the planning system does not guarantee it will be met.
Authorities are required to identify affordable housing need, but crucially, they are not required to plan to meet it in full. Instead, need is considered only in “context of its likely delivery”. This remains the case even following the 2024 updates to National Policy. The result is predictable. Local Plans that openly fall short of meeting affordable need are still considered sound and are allowed to proceed.
This systemic disconnect between evidence and action fundamentally undermines trust in the planning process. It means that even the most diligent evidence base can still lead to outcomes where thousands are left without access to the secure, affordable homes they need. Without stronger requirements to bridge this gap the system is planning, by design, to fail.
What Needs to Change?
If we are serious about tackling the housing crisis, we must overhaul both the evidence base and the policy framework for delivering affordable homes. This requires action on several fronts:
- A clearer, mandatory standard for assessing affordable housing need.
National guidance must be strengthened to ensure consistency through a transparent national methodology that acknowledges the limitations of available data while ensuring alignment with overall housing need. - A requirement to plan for, not just assess, affordable housing need.
Local Plans should set ambitious, deliverable targets, and plan soundness should depend on meaningful delivery. - Stronger protections for affordable housing in decision-making.
Following the Vistry judgment, national policy must reinforce that weight to affordable housing should reflect the scale of need and any associated shortfalls.
Without decisive and immediate reform, the gap between affordable housing need and delivery will continue to widen, undermining efforts to resolve the housing crisis.
Beyond the Statistics
Ultimately, this is not about numbers. It’s about people:
- Families crammed into overcrowded flats,
- Key workers priced out of their communities,
- Children growing up without stability,
- Survivors of abuse stuck without safe housing,
- People with disabilities waiting for suitable homes,
- Low-income workers commuting long distances,
- Graduates unable to afford independence.
These are the lives behind the statistics. They deserve better.
We are not short of data. We are not short on need. What we lack is the policy framework to allow local areas to deliver homes that people can actually afford to live in. It’s time to implement long-term solutions that create a planning system fit for the scale of the challenge.
This piece is sponsored by the Land, Planning and Development Federation (LPDF).
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