Government is falling short of its ambition on new homes
The Prosper UK Housing Commission, a group of industry experts chaired by former Housing Minister and Downing Street Chief of Staff Gavin Barwell, today publishes Solving the Housing Crisis: A Plan to Make Homes More Affordable in Every Postcode.
Its report finds housebuilding held back on two fronts, and that both have to be tackled together. Weak consumer confidence means builders cannot sell the homes they are already building. And with costs rising while prices stay flat, many schemes with planning permission are no longer viable.
At the party conferences, the Government announced Your First Home, a shared equity scheme for first-time buyers of new homes, which addresses demand, and the Conservatives pledged to reform Section 106, which addresses viability. The report goes further than either party, setting out a package that tackles demand and viability together and adds measures to increase supply.
Gavin Barwell, chair of the Prosper UK Housing Commission, said: “I’m pleased that even before the report is published the Government has adopted one of our recommendations and the Conservatives have said they would implement another, but our recommendations are not ‘Pick N Mix’.
“Boosting demand without increasing supply will help a few people at the expense of everyone else, and tackling viability without tackling demand will make little difference. That is the view of the diverse group of industry experts who produced this report.”
The commission says half the £76,000 rise in the cost of building a new home since 2020 comes from regulation, policy and tax. In the year to September 2025, planning permission was granted for 209,781 homes in England, the lowest since 2013. At the end of 2025, a record 176,130 children in England were living in temporary accommodation.
The Commission’s recommendations include:
- On viability: a freeze on new regulatory burdens for at least three years, a two-part test for every obligation on new housing (whether the cost belongs on new homes and whether it is proportionate) and limiting section 106 to what a development itself needs
- On demand: a temporary, strictly targeted shared equity scheme for first-time buyers of new, energy-efficient homes, capped at around a fifth of sales on each site and funded by an industry access fee
- To increase supply further: a National Planning Service to decide major applications and a national review of the Green Belt, keeping land that stops towns and cities sprawling and merging and releasing the rest; and higher density as standard, with more homes on each site
- On renting: cutting stamp duty on Build to Rent developments, a standard national template for their section 106 agreements and ruling out rent controls in law to restore investor confidence; and a Public Build to Rent programme pairing public landowners with Build to Rent developers to build more homes for the social rent sector
The report argues that building the homes the country needs is central to unlocking economic growth, and that people buying new homes should not have to pay for problems that belong to everyone.
Barwell added: “Despite its welcome reforms of the planning system and funding for affordable housing, the Government is falling far short of its ambition to build 1.5 million homes in five years, and the latest figures, particularly in London, are little short of catastrophic. The victims are all around us. A few are sleeping rough, but most are hidden, stuck in temporary accommodation or unable to buy a home as their parents did.
“Our housing crisis has been building for nearly 50 years and there is no silver bullet. Some of what we recommend won’t be popular, but unless we attack the problem from every angle it will only get worse.”
