How to Bring Affordable Homes to Britain

More than 1.7m households are now waiting for social housing. Yet last year the government set itself a very modest target of just 150,000 new affordable homes to be built over four years. There are now serious doubts as to whether even this target will be achieved, given changes to benefit rules. But it needn't be like this. Analysis shows that as many as 200,000 affordable homes a year could be built within the same budget constraints – if government and industry worked together to reduce the subsidy per home needed. The primary problem is the cost of land. Homelessness and inadequate housing are not fundamentally because of a shortage of land but because of the way the market for land operates. This is reflected in the fact that social landlords are paying on average more than £1m an acre, or about £40,000 per home – more than 100 times the price of agricultural land. As a result, affordable housing has to be heavily subsidised by the taxpayer – whether through capital grants to social landlords (also averaging around £40,000 per home) or housing benefit. Read more on the Guardian website.