Andy Burnham has said Labour will “oversee the biggest council housebuilding programme since the post-war period” using vacant land to reduce costs.
However, Together’s analysis of data provided by property data platform Searchland found that publicly owned brownfield land in England has capacity for 187,000-207,000 homes at most.
This is less than two-thirds of the 300,000 social and affordable home programme previously announced by Labour, before accounting for whether each site is genuinely deliverable.
The analysis found that the state does not own enough registered land to build the programme on public land alone, meaning a third or more would still have to come from land bought at its current market value.
The next step towards a better home buying journey
Sponsored by Halifax Intermediaries
SME lenders matter to delivery
The analysis states that a programme built on vacant public land is, by its nature, a programme of thousands of small, dispersed brownfield plots, of the kind that typically take 1-50 homes – precisely the land that volume housebuilders overlook.
The homes on public land will overwhelmingly be delivered by SME builders and regional contractors, the type of homebuilders who delivered the post-war council house boom.
According to the analysis, after planning, access to finance is the single biggest constraint on SME housebuilders.
Mainstream banks retreated from SME development lending after 2008 and rely on rigid, one-size-fits-all criteria that cannot price the realities of public brownfield land, which include contamination and remediation, non-standard construction, access and ransom strips, phased build-out and planning risk.
The analysis notes that a small builder typically has its capital tied up in just one or two schemes, so a delay or ‘computer says no’ decision can stall the business entirely.
Regional concentration
The public land that does exist is heavily concentrated. A handful of authorities, led by Birmingham (185 sites, capacity for around 11,500 homes), account for a large share of the national total. For most of the country, vacant public land is scarce.
In around two-thirds of the 20 areas with the deepest housing shortfalls, there is little or no significant public land to build on.
Much of the largest public landholding sits in authorities that are already meeting or beating their housing targets – among them, Leeds, Wandsworth, Waltham Forest, Newcastle and Nottingham.
Only five authorities – Birmingham, Bristol, Bradford, Lewisham and Kirklees – combine a serious deficit with a serious public land holding.
Ryan Etchells, chief commercial officer at Together, said: “Building on vacant public land is a sensible idea, but our analysis shows it can only ever be part of the answer. There isn’t enough public land to deliver a programme this size, and that’s before considering that the places with the greatest need tend to have the least land. As it stands, whether this pledge reaches your community is close to a postcode lottery.
“The areas falling furthest behind won’t be rescued by land the state happens to own. They need sites to be assembled and bought, existing land intensified, and the wider public estate brought into play – and all of that needs finance that moves quickly and understands complex, non-standard sites. That is precisely the gap specialist lenders like Together exist to fill.”
He added: “Making more public land available is an important part of boosting housing supply, but land alone doesn’t build homes. Developers need access to funding that can keep pace with the realities of a project, whether that’s navigating planning delays, drawing down finance in stages or moving quickly when a site becomes available.
“In many high-demand areas, developers also need acquisition finance to bring sites together before a scheme can get off the ground. These are often complex opportunities that don’t fit a standard lending model, which is why specialist lenders have such an important role to play. If the funding isn’t there, even the most promising sites can struggle to move from allocation to construction.”
