‘Scandalously low level’ of affordable housing on sold-off land

The New Economics Foundation has criticised the ‘scandalously low level’ of affordable housing planned on public land sold off by the government.

An analysis by the think tank of recently published figures shows that while the government has sold enough public land for developers to build 131,000 homes, only 2.6% of those homes will be for social rent.

The government’s Public Land for Housing programme was first launched in 2011, before being relaunched in 2015.

When it was relaunched, the government said it aimed to release land for 160,000 homes by the end of March 2020 under the programme.

According to the government, a total of 1,370 sites have been sold for housing up until the end of March 2019.

The figures also show between 2015 and June 2019, land with capacity for around 48,000 homes has been sold by all Whitehall departments.

But further analysis of the figures by the New Economics Foundation claims that just 15% of homes built on public land will be classified as ​‘affordable housing’.

It adds that the government does not have data on what kind of affordable housing the majority of this is.

Since the government changed the definition of ​‘affordable’ to include homes rented at 80% market rates, social rent is widely understood to be the only housing genuinely affordable to people on low incomes.

Such affordable housing also includes ​‘shared ownership’ homes, which in London are accessible to those earning up to £80,000 a year.

Therefore, as a percentage of total affordable housing built on sold-off public land, social rented housing will still only make up 17% of all affordable homes built.

‘The availability and price of land is at the heart of the housing affordability crisis — the more we sell off public land to build luxury apartments, the worse the housing crisis gets,’ said senior researcher, Hanna Wheatley.

‘With the land it owns, government could have helped fix this by delivering a much higher proportion of genuinely affordable housing. But it has not and what the release of data therefore shows is a key opportunity slipping through our fingers.’

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