Briefing: Debate on Housing, Planning and the Green Belt

By: Robin White
Published: February 2018

Briefing: Debate on Housing, Planning and Green Belt

In England, we need to build more homes – this is an accepted fact. However, in the ‘Housing White Paper’ published in February this year the government accepted that the housing market is broken and simply isn’t delivering: in 2016/17 in England just 183,570 new homes were built, and of these just 41,530 were affordable. While this is an increase on the previous year it remains well below the government’s 300,000-homes-per-year target.

At the heart of the challenge is our reliance on a speculative model of housebuilding. This model simply won't deliver the number of homes that we need, and particularly the affordable homes we need.

Shelter believes we need to both look at this speculative model and how we can ensure it does deliver the genuinely affordable homes we need, while also considering how an additional model of housebuilding, such as our New Civic Housebuilding model, could supplement the current system.