Stop me if you have heard this before: we can and must build more homes on public sector land.
Stop me if you have heard this before: we can and must build more homes on public sector land. This is not quite a direct quote from David Cameron, but this is effectively what he said three years ago at the Conservative Party conference in Manchester when he set out plans to compel government departments to release enough land by March 2015 to build 100,000 homes. We heard at our annual housing seminar in London this week from Sir Bob Kerslake, permanent secretary at the Department for Communities and Local Government, that the government is on track to deliver this aim, although as Sir Bob admitted, it has taken a ‘Herculean effort’ to get to this point.
At Savills we applaud the progress Sir Bob has made, but believe it should be easier to use some of the land under public control to build much-needed housing. If any further proof were needed of the urgency of the situation, my colleague Lucian Cook, head of residential research at Savills, provided ample evidence. According to his calculations, the demand for housing is growing across much of the population (not just those under 35 either) for private rented accommodation. There will be 1.2 million more households in this sector by 2019 – a rise of 24 per cent. There is also an urgent need to build a better and larger choice of properties for older people, to encourage them to sell their large, underused, family homes and make them available for the next generation. Better use of our national asset of public land can go a long way to addressing these issues and boosting housing supply.
We believe public land can be used to build two million homes. Research we trailed this week, called ‘Unearthing Potential’, analysed 250,000 hectares of land held by the Central Government estate in England. We estimate that 13,000 hectares of this would be most suitable for residential development and that
600,000 homes could be built on this land. In addition, we examined records for the land owned in the capital by the Greater London Authority and found capacity for 100,000 homes.
So far so encouraging. However, land controlled by the NHS and local authorities is excluded from the 250,000 hectare figure, due to less comprehensive data in these areas. As council assets constitute 46 per cent of the public estate in England, we did not want to ignore these two areas in our analysis.
Savills has considerable experience of working in partnership to bring forward NHS sites for development. We can therefore make an informed judgement that there is scope for significant additional housing to be built on sites, even those that retain a medical use. We estimate that 300,000 homes could be built through more intensive use of even operational NHS sites. If a similar approach is taken to local authority land of seeking to intensify land use, we estimate around one million homes could be built. This brings us to our headline figure of two million homes.
Clearly more research is needed to understand exactly what is possible and where. There is also an important issue, highlighted in her remarks to our event by Dame Kate Barker, of ensuring any increase in public land for housing coming to market does not cause owners of private land to sit on their hands for a few years. But our initial work has whetted our appetite to explore this further.
As Keith House, leader of Eastleigh Borough Council and joint-chair of the government review into the local role in boosting housing supply, told our event: ‘We need to make sure more local authority and wider public sector land is brought forward for housing delivery – not dithering.’
For the report ‘Unearthing Potential’ on how two million homes could be built on public sector land, please contact Becci Marris on bmarris@savills.com