A house is labour mobility, a child's development, whether an older person ends up in hospital, and whether a family can form in the first place. The cost of housing failures is paid everywhere except in the housing debate: the NHS, the schools, the labour market, the Treasury's benefits bill. Housing is a substrate. Mess it up and everything built on it wobbles.
We have been messing it up for forty years.
The private rental market
Most new households in their twenties and thirties will not buy a home in the next decade. They will rent. The rental market they enter is one of the least regulated in Europe relative to tenant security, and one of the most expensive relative to wages.
Rents in many cities rose faster than wages throughout the 2020s. Section 21 no-fault evictions, even where nominally restricted, still create precarity because landlords can sell, renovate, or reprice around the edges of the law. A family given two months to leave a home they have lived in for eight years cannot plan for school places, commutes, or care for elderly parents nearby. That precarity shows up in GP records as stress, in schools as disrupted children, and in employers as staff who cannot accept promotion if it requires moving.
Ending section 21 properly is the baseline. Beyond that, the programme introduces longer default tenancy terms, limits on in-tenancy rent increases tied to a published index, and a national landlord register with minimum standards enforcement. These are not attacks on responsible landlords. They are the conditions under which renting is a viable long-term home rather than a waiting room for ownership that never arrives.
The Land Question
The planning system, as it operates in practice, transfers public value into private land values. Every time a local authority grants planning permission, it makes a gift to whoever happened to own that particular patch of earth. The community builds the infrastructure, funds the services, absorbs the visual and social impact. The landowner captures the uplift. That is the mechanism.
The current compulsory purchase regime is slow, expensive, and legally risky for councils. Landowners can claim "hope value" under the Land Compensation Act 1961: the assessed value of the potential planning permission the land might receive, even when no planning permission exists or is imminent. In some documented cases this adds 30-50% to compensation paid, not for anything the landowner built or invested in, but purely for the expectation of permission that the community's own planning decisions created. Reforming hope value to apply only where a specific, extant planning permission exists would reduce per-unit land assembly costs in high-demand areas by GBP 50,000-150,000.
The Community Infrastructure Levy should be reformed to capture a minimum of 30% of the uplift from agricultural or commercial use value to residential use value at the point of permission. Revenue should be ring-fenced for council housing construction, not absorbed into general fund expenditure where it disappears.
What the Programme Does
Unlock local authority borrowing now. Local authorities can currently only borrow against their own revenue, which is why most stopped building decades ago. The Public Works Loan Board should be accelerated for council housing starts, and the punitive early repayment clauses that discourage large-scale borrowing should be removed. That change, made by the Treasury, unblocks billions in construction capacity without requiring new legislation.
Ten thousand council homes before the end of 2026. Identify the top 50 local authorities by housing need and shovel-ready supply. Negotiate direct grant agreements. That number sounds small. It is the beginning of reversing a collapse that dropped council housebuilding from over 100,000 completions a year in the 1960s to fewer than 2,000 in some recent years.
End section 21 evictions properly. The Renters' Rights Act 2024 made some progress but retained significant loopholes. Section 21 notices should be abolished entirely. This is not radical. It is the baseline of a functioning rental market.
Mandatory minimum energy performance standards for all rental properties. Cold homes kill. Damp and mould kill. Overcrowding damages child development. These are not metaphors. The standards should require EPC C as a minimum by 2028 and EPC A by 2030, with government grant available to social landlords who cannot fund improvements from existing rental income. Landlords who cannot meet the standard should be required to sell to the local authority, with compulsory purchase available as the enforcement mechanism.
Heat adaptation on existing stock. British housing was designed for a climate that no longer exists. The 2026 heatwave is not a one-off. It is the new baseline. In France and Spain, external shutters, awnings, and passive cooling on existing buildings are normal because summers have been hot for decades. In the UK they are often blocked by planning rules that treat shutters as unauthorised alterations to a listed facade or a conservation area. The programme introduces a permitted-development right for external shutters, awnings, and other passive cooling measures on residential buildings, with a fast-track process where local design codes apply. The cost of fitting shutters to a typical terrace is a few hundred pounds. The cost of a heat-related hospital admission for an elderly tenant in an unshaded top-floor flat is thousands. This is cheap to mandate and expensive to ignore.
Heat-resilience standards for new builds. Part O of the building regulations introduced overheating risk assessment for new homes, but the standards remain weaker than those France applies under its environmental regulation for new construction, where summer comfort and shading are explicit design requirements. New social and private homes should meet a minimum standard for orientation, external shading, ventilation, and ceiling insulation that keeps internal temperatures below harmful thresholds without relying on air conditioning. Air conditioning is a last resort, not a plan. It loads the grid at exactly the moment the grid is already under stress.
The Construction Capacity Question
The UK currently completes about 28,000 social homes per year. The programme targets 100,000. That requires more than a threefold increase in social housing output. The constraint is not primarily money. It is labour, materials, and the structure of the construction industry.
The realistic trajectory is not a cliff-edge from 28,000 to 100,000. Years 1-2: priority on unlocking shovel-ready sites with existing contractors. Target 40,000-50,000 social homes per year using current supply chains. Years 3-4: modular and off-site construction sector begins scaling, apprenticeship completions start entering the workforce, SME builder support schemes rebuild the mid-size builder sector. Target 70,000-80,000. Year 5 onwards: full capacity expansion. Target 100,000.
This requires treating construction capacity as a policy objective in its own right, not leaving it to the market to respond after the programme is announced. Apprenticeship targets for construction trades should be raised immediately. A national construction skills fund should be established. Modular manufacturers should have access to government-backed development finance to scale capacity before demand alone justifies it.
Land assembly is the other bottleneck. Councils with shovel-ready ambition often lack land at a price that makes social rent viable. Reforming hope value and accelerating compulsory purchase where planning permission already exists is what turns housing need on a spreadsheet into foundations in the ground. Without land reform, the GBP 25 billion programme becomes a subsidy to landowners rather than a supply of homes.
The Housing-Health Link
World Health Organization estimates suggest cold housing is responsible for a substantial proportion of excess winter deaths in the UK. The links between poor housing and respiratory illness, cardiovascular disease, and mental health deterioration are well established.
A hospital ward full of patients whose primary diagnosis is "lives in a cold, damp, overcrowded house" is not a health system problem. It is a housing system problem that the health system is paying to manage. The Resolution Foundation has estimated the economic cost of housing-related barriers to labour mobility at several billion pounds per year in uncollected tax revenue and elevated benefit expenditure.
The cost of a programme to build 100,000 social homes per year, at roughly GBP 250,000 per unit in construction costs, is GBP 25 billion annually. Against the housing benefit bill of over GBP 30 billion per year, the NHS treatment costs attributable to poor housing of roughly GBP 1.4 billion per year, and the economic inactivity costs: this is not obviously expensive. Against the fact that the UK built over 100,000 council homes per year in parts of the postwar period, it is not historically unprecedented.
Young families priced out of home ownership are not a separate demographic from the NHS waiting list or the food bank queue. They are the same people at different stages of the same squeeze. Housing policy that only optimises for existing homeowners is housing policy for the past decade's winners. The programme optimises for the people who need a home now.
Housing pressure is primarily a supply problem, not a scapegoating problem. Social housing allocation follows statutory criteria; asylum accommodation in hotels operates on a separate system from council waiting lists. When net migration is debated without building more homes, the debate misidentifies the bottleneck. Provisional net migration was 171,000 in the year to December 2025 (ONS), while England has been building far below estimated need for decades. Fixing allocation myths does not build council homes. Building council homes does.
The Next Piece
The housing programme connects to defence in a way that is easy to miss. Service personnel retention depends on affordable family housing near bases. Defence estates are part of the national housing stock. A country that cannot house its own soldiers' families cannot sustain the force structure described in the next chapter.
Optional depth: Housing & Planning: Deep Dive.
Read next: Defence and Foreign Policy.