The Current Housing Crisis in the UK:
A report recently published by the Building Back Britain Commission (BBBC) outlines that up to 140,000 new homes will be needed “per annum over the next 20 years” to keep pace with the rising demand for affordable housing in the UK, and that government needs to step up its efforts regarding ‘levelling up’ by “putting housing at the heart of those plans” and addressing how demand is calculated across different parts of the UK (p.4).
Most notably, the report indicates that “most pressure for new housing is in the southern regions, with many local authorities in these areas failing to meet their housing targets”, and that up to an additional 67,000 new homes will be needed per year on top of the current estimates put forward by the government to deal with the current housing delivery shortages (p.5).
Through utilising Oxygen’s Illuminator system, we can examine Council spend on property construction-related services, which includes the construction of affordable housing, and highlight specifically how spending has varied across the nine regions in England. Overall, the 2020/21 Financial Year saw local authorities spend just over £2.91bn on property construction related services – with Greater London and South East England each contributing roughly 17%. The total spend for Greater London in 2020/21 reached £489.91M, which is over £320M more than that recorded for North East England, where the total spend accounted for 5.76% as illustrated in the chart below: