Sixty housing interventions. Why is England still unaffordable?

Since 1980, successive governments have introduced more than 60 initiatives to fix housing affordability, writes Jeremy Hinds of CivicScape. Yet 1.33m households remain on waiting lists, 176,000 children live in temporary accommodation, rents are rising and homes cost around eight times average earnings. The question is: why has none of it worked?

Those figures demand a more difficult question than the usual one. Not simply: why are we not building enough homes? But: why has a system subject to so much policy attention become less able to provide homes that people can afford?

Net housing supply has averaged more than 200,000 homes a year over the past five years. That is a significant level of output. But the homes being delivered are plainly not matching the need that exists, at prices or rents households can sustain.

More building matters. Planning reform matters. Delivery capacity matters. But they cannot, on their own, explain why affordability has deteriorated so persistently across areas with profoundly different land markets, local politics and development conditions.

The problem is not a shortage of interventions. It is the logic on which those interventions operate.

An instrument cannot escape its benchmark

Most housing policy is designed to make the existing market produce a more affordable outcome. That is a reasonable intention. But it has a limiting consequence: the intervention is measured against the very market it is meant to correct.

Take Section 106. It secures affordable homes through the planning system, but the obligation is tested through viability. Viability is assessed against market values, market costs and the residual value of land. When revenues fall or costs rise, affordable housing is often the negotiable element. The policy is therefore constrained by the market framework within which it operates.

The same is true of rent. A rent set at 80% of a market rent that is itself unaffordable does not necessarily become affordable. It is simply less unaffordable.

Demand-side interventions have encountered a similar problem. Help to Buy increased purchasing power in a supply-constrained market. Predictably, part of that support was capitalised into the price of the asset. Prices went up. Grant programmes have helped unlock schemes and remain important. But they operate against a land-price and market-value structure that can absorb public support before it reaches the household who needs a genuinely affordable home.

The current Social and Affordable Homes Programme and National Housing Bank are substantial commitments. They may improve delivery and capital flow. The question is whether they can alter the underlying outcome while the benchmark for affordability remains market rent and market value.

This is not an argument that every instrument has failed on its own terms, or that the people operating them are not acting in good faith. It is an argument about system design. If the output of every intervention is ultimately determined by a market that is unaffordable, the intervention inherits that constraint.

More than 40 years of affordable housing interventions have not fixed the problem. Link below to register data. Credit: CivicScape

This is a sequence, not a pile

It is tempting to see 60 interventions as a pile of policies that should be rationalised. The history is more revealing than that.

One intervention often creates the conditions for the next. Right to Buy reduced the stock of publicly owned homes. Limits on the use of capital receipts restricted replacement. Stock transfer and the growth of housing associations brought greater reliance on private finance. Private finance required stronger and more predictable rental income. Affordable Rent, tied to market rent, became part of that response. Section 106 and grant programmes were then asked to close gaps that the underlying model continued to generate.

The point is not to romanticise a past system or argue that one policy explains everything. It is to recognise that the present is the product of accumulated choices. Each new remedy has been asked to correct the consequences of the previous one without changing the framework that created them.

That is why a 61st intervention, however well intentioned, may not be enough.

Other countries made a different choice

England is not the only country to face affordability pressures. But several countries have built a significant part of their housing system outside speculative market logic.

Vienna provides publicly subsidised homes to around 60% of its population through municipal homes and limited-profit cooperatives. Rents are linked to construction costs and long-term finance rather than conventional market comparables. Homes remain within a cost-rent system rather than being repeatedly recycled into an inflated open market.

Singapore’s Housing Development Board houses more than 80% of the population on long leases. Its model rests, in part, on public capture of land value that in England is often treated as a private entitlement once planning consent is secured.

Germany’s land readjustment system allows municipalities to assemble land, install infrastructure and retain part of the resulting uplift. The Netherlands built a large housing association sector that operated outside the speculative market, although later marketisation has demonstrated how easily that protection can be weakened.

These are not templates to import wholesale. England has different institutions, land law and political history. But they show that housing systems are designed. The balance between market provision, public purpose, land value and long-term affordability is a political choice, not an economic law.

Start with affordability

The practical question is not whether to abolish the market. It is whether England can build a durable housing system alongside it: one designed from the outset to meet need at a cost households can sustain.

Call it Civic Housing. Its starting point is simple. What does it cost to provide a decent home in a particular place? What can a household on a given income sustainably pay? The task of land, finance, tenure and governance is to bring those two figures together — and keep them together over time.

Elements of that approach already exist. Community Land Trusts retain land for community benefit. Mayoral Development Corporations can assemble land and direct delivery. Co-operative models have deep roots in this country. Local authorities, registered providers, developers and investors all have roles to play. What is missing is the legal architecture, scale and shared ambition to make permanently affordable, non-speculative homes a normal part of supply rather than a marginal correction after the market has failed.

There will also be reforms that improve the existing system: more transparent viability, better use of public land, more effective grant, stronger council capacity, long-term rental certainty and better routes to deliver homes for people in temporary accommodation. These should be pursued. But they should be judged against a clear test: do they create homes that remain genuinely affordable, or do they merely make an unaffordable system function more efficiently?

The question for this moment

A new government is rightly focused on growth, delivery and changing how the state works with places. That makes this the moment to ask the question housing policy has too often avoided.

Not: which is the next instrument? But: what would a housing system look like if it were designed to provide the homes England needs, at prices people can pay, for the long term?

I do not claim to have a finished blueprint. I am putting the question and hoping Andy Burnham and his government are asking the same, because without it, we risk adding another layer to a system that has become very good at generating interventions and very poor at delivering affordability.

Working with Place Media Group, we want to hear practical answers from across the sector: from councils, registered providers, developers, investors, planners, charities and communities. What one change would most help deliver permanently affordable homes at scale? What should be retained, reformed, replaced or built anew?

The debate must be wider than planning and bigger than targets. England needs more homes. It also needs a housing model capable of ensuring that the homes it builds work for the people and places they are supposed to serve.

Jeremy Hinds is a chartered town planner and founder of CivicScape. The full evidence register can be downloaded here 1980 2026 housing interventions. Data cited in the underlying paper draws on MHCLG housing supply and homelessness statistics, ONS affordability data, Homes England, Nationwide and Shelter analysis.

This is the first in a series of articles on the future of housing by Place Media Group and CivicScape.