Affordable Housing Across England
Using the the live table of data up to 2022 from gov.uk [1] , we created a bar chart of affordable housing for the regions across England (Figure 1) where the “Completion” data is from 1991-2023 with the Help to Buy scheme included while “Start” is only from 2015 – 2022.
Figure 1: Bar chart of affordable housing schemes within the regions of England
From the bar chart, it is evident that London has the highest number of affordable housing for both “Completions” and “Start” with the South East following closely behind. This large demand is most likely due to the high cost of living in the capital resulting in the need for affordable housing The region with the Smallest number of affordable houses for both categories is the North East suggesting that the demand is not as high as other regions which may be due to costs of renting or buying a house being more affordable.
Furthermore, the order of regions with the highest number of affordable houses that have started is the same order for houses completed except for the North West and South West who swap places. This suggests that the demand for housing has remained constant across England for each Region and hasn’t changed.
Affordable Housing in Other Regions of the UK
This housing issue affects all the countries within the UK, where there were 44,220 applications on the waiting list for social renting as of the 30th June 2022 in Northern Ireland. [2] However, plans have been put in place to combat this issue as seen by Scotland’s new “Housing to 2040” policy with the aim of delivering 110,000 affordable homes by 2032. Of these homes, they aim for at least 70% of them to be available for social rent and have allocated £3.2 billion in funding for councils to build more affordable housing between 2021-2026. [3]
The Welsh government has also set out to build more affordable houses, where they delivered 3604 new affordable homes between 2020-2021 making it the highest number since 2007-2008. This was part of the Welsh Government’s 2016 work programme “Taking Wales Forward 2016 -2021”, to build an additional 20,000 affordable homes between 2016 and 2021. [4]
References
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/statistical-data-sets/live-tables-on-affordable-housing-supply
[3] https://www.gov.scot/policies/more-homes/affordable-housing-supply/
