Housing, 50 Shades listeners, will know, is slap bang in the middle of the intersection between planning and politics and nothing offers both the illustration and impact of this than affordable housing.

Research commissioned by the National Housing Federation and Crisis from Professor Glen Bramley at Heriot-Watt University in 2018 identified a need for 340,000 homes each year in England to 2031, including 145,000 affordable homes.

According though to recent research from Turley and Tetlow King, commissioned by the LPDF, it is estimated that only 35,500 net additional affordable homes have been delivered on average in each of the last ten years.

Delivery is especially poor in the country’s largest urban centres. The largest 19, excluding London, have collectively added around 1,200 affordable homes per annum over the last ten years.

Whether there is a housing crisis, or a challenge, or whether all of this is just a figment of the construction industry’s imagination, will depend upon whether you ask a single parent in emergency accommodation, a politician in electioneering mode or Simon Jenkins. What is indisputable however is that the planning system has a huge role to play in all of this.

Why are we where we are? What are the obstacles to delivering more affordable housing and how might they be overcome?

Sam Stafford puts these questions to Antony Pollard, Head of Economics at Turley; Annie Gingell, Principal Planner at Tetlow King; and Marie Chadwick, Policy Leader at the National Housing Federation.

Some accompanying reading.

Housing supply requirements: low-income households & homeless people

https://www.crisis.org.uk/ending-homelessness/homelessness-knowledge-hub/housing-models-and-access/housing-supply-requirements-across-great-britain-2018/

 An Affordable Housing Emergency

https://www.lpdf.co.uk/latest-publications

Five things we learned from Homes England’s Affordable Homes Programme data

https://www.insidehousing.co.uk/insight/insight/five-things-we-learned-from-homes-englands-affordable-homes-programme-data-74347#:~:text=The%20Affordable%20Homes%20Programme%20is,of%20thousands%20of%20affordable%20homes

Simon Jenkins plumbs new depths of housing nonsense

https://capx.co/simon-jenkins-plumbs-new-depths-of-housing-nonsense/

People in housing need 2021

https://www.housing.org.uk/resources/people-in-housing-need-2021/

The damaging legacy of Right to Buy

https://neweconomics.org/2022/05/the-damaging-legacy-of-right-to-buy

Notes from the Green Belt: what’s so very special about Colney Heath?

https://www.planoraks.com/posts-1/notes-from-the-green-belt-whats-so-very-special-about-colney-heath

Some accompanying listening.

A House Is Not A Home - The Charlatans

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LljqVqRPiUI

50 Shades T-Shirts!

If you have listened to Episode 45 of the 50 Shades of Planning Podcast you will have heard Clive Betts say that...

'In the Netherlands planning is seen as part of the solution. In the UK, too often, planning is seen as part of the problem'.

Sam said in reply that that would look good on a t-shirt and it does. Further details can be found here: http://samuelstafford.blogspot.com/2021/07/50-shades-of-planning-t-shirts.html