A study by the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) has identified at least 9,000 homes directly created by local authorities in England in 2017-2018. This is based on figures supplied by 83 English councils to an online survey. Of these, 42% are affordable homes and 23% are social.
Projecting the figure across the whole of England, the research estimates that over 13,000 new homes were delivered by English local authorities last year — the highest since 1990. MHCLG figures suggest that the previous high for local authority housebuilding was 14,020 homes in 1990.
The RTPI study also found that much of this building activity has been delivered through companies wholly or jointly owned by councils, with 78% of local authorities now owning a housing or property company. Of those councils without a housing company, 20% are considering establishing one.
Ian Tant, RTPI President, said: “Having local authorities back as key players in the housing market is vital to tackling the housing crisis. It’s great news that they are becoming more active again, delivering a wide range of house types to meet a wide range of needs.
“But the lack of land is still a major issue. The Government needs to help councils access land at the right price to develop themselves or sell to earn the income they need. Government should also consider a more direct role in increasing supply and influencing the location of housing.”
Paul Dennett, Salford City Mayor, who helped to launch the report, added: “We welcome this exciting new research from RTPI which shows how local authorities like our own are delivering new homes to try and meet local needs. We have realised that it is not enough to wait for the market to deliver the homes we need to tackle homelessness, rough sleeping and the UK’s broken housing market.
“We are using the opportunities we have as a city council to deliver more truly affordable housing. Now we need more powers and resources, especially given our infrastructure and post-industrial land challenges to help us develop a new range of targeted interventions.”
Professor Janet Morphet of the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, said: “More councils than ever are engaging in the direct delivery of housing, motivated by their role in housing provision, homelessness and income generation. Increasingly councils are concerned about the quality of housing being built in their areas. We have heard across the country, from all types of local authority, that councils are no longer relying on or waiting for developments to come through the planning system to provide the housing that they need and are taking action to deliver directly.”
“Councils are also beginning to manage all their work on housing provision, whether on planning delivery, or through companies, Housing Revenue Account and Joint Ventures through single cross professional teams. Council leadership is now emerging as a critical success factor.”
Apart from the obvious reason to meet housing need, the research found that councils are increasingly involved in the direct provision of housing because they want to tackle homelessness and create better places through higher quality design, improved space standards and external layouts.
The wish to speed up development and a sense of obligation for councils to build have also gained ground, when compared with a similar survey in 2017.
71% of councils also said they are building or planning to build special needs housing particularly for older people, compared to 42% in 2017.
The Local Authority Direct Provision of Housing study is conducted by Professor Janice Morphet and Dr Ben Clifford of the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London. It is a follow-up study to a similar one conducted in 2017.
The study does not assess the effect of the removal of the housing borrowing cap on housing delivery, as the surveys were undertaken before the policy was announced in October 2018.
