Cracking the code on Section 106
Posted: October 17, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Section 106 Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For something so important, the Section 106 system of providing affordable homes seems to exist inside a black box.
We know what goes in (developments all over the country, local councils trying to get the contributions they can) and we know what comes out (almost half of affordable homes delivered for year).
We also know that this is just part of a wider system for capturing land value not just for affordable homes but also community infrastructure and facilities.
But the inner workings of the system seem hidden.
This is most obviously true when it comes to the dark arts of viability assessments that allow experienced developers to run rings around under-resourced local authority planning departments.
But it can also be true in reverse, with the complexity of the system holding development back and sparking calls for reform.
Read the rest of this entry »Making the most of Labour’s inheritance
Posted: April 18, 2024 Filed under: Housing need, Planning, Section 106, Social housing | Tags: Labour Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing
The economic inheritance of the next government will be so dire that it’s hard to avoid thinking that the prospects for housing investment will be even worse.
Take an already inadequate Affordable Homes Programme, add higher costs for construction, building safety, decarbonisation and follow the freeze on capital investment implied in current spending plans and you seem to have a recipe for housing disaster.
However, an important chapter in the latest UK Housing Review challenges that view on two important levels.
Glen Bramley builds on his longstanding work on housing need by essentially looking through the other end of the telescope at different scenarios for total completions of new homes in 2031 (ie after market conditions have recovered from the cost of living crisis etc).
His ‘low’ scenario corresponds with actual performance recently while ‘very low’ takes account of the current economic climate and recent changes in government planning policy that will reduce supply still further.
As the graph shows, under the ‘low’ scenario, there would be just 211,000 completions per year by 2031, with around 66,000 affordable homes including 35,000 for social rent. ‘Very low’ cuts those numbers by more than 20 per cent to just 164,000 overall and 50,000 affordable including 24,000 for social rent.
Judged against those numbers, the other three scenarios look a long way off, especially the promised land of ‘High-medium’ and ‘High’, which correspond with Labour’s pledge of 1.5 million new homes over five years and longstanding calls for 90,000 social rent homes a year.
Read the rest of this entry »The problems with shared ownership
Posted: April 11, 2024 Filed under: Section 106, Shared ownership Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Is shared ownership at a crossroads or a dead end?
The fact that the question has to be posed at all is an indications of the issues now facing the part-buy, part-rent product that has been a mainstay of the affordable home ownership market, Section 106 planning contributions and housing association development programmes over the last three decades.
But after a month that has seen a critical report published by an all-party committee of MPs and relentlessly negative media coverage based on the personal experiences of shared owners, it is also a question that needs answers urgently.
A front-page story in The Observer featured shared owners who have fallen victim to soaring service charges and increases of more than 40 per cent in a year.
With grim irony, they had bought homes at Elephant Park in south London, site of the controversial demolition of the Heygate estate that was meant to be a showpiece for market-led regeneration.
BBC London has reported on cases including a shared owner in King’s Cross in north London whose annual service charge for 2024 rose 274 per cent from £4,200 to £16,000.
There may be many shared owners out there who are happy with their home but these are far from the first horror stories and sadly they will not be the last about a tenure that is meant to offer buyers an affordable way to staircase their way up the housing ladder.
The all-party Levelling Up, Housing and Communities (LUHC) Committee published a report just before Easter highlighting above-inflation rent increases, uncapped service charges, repairs and maintenance liabilities and complex leases that it said make shared ownership ‘an unbearable reality’ for people looking to become full owners.
Read the rest of this entry »The Westferry affair and planning reform
Posted: June 29, 2020 Filed under: Housebuilding, Planning, Section 106 | Tags: Robert Jenrick 1 CommentOriginally posted as a column for Inside Housing on June 29.
A cartoon in a national newspaper last week showed a pig about to dive into a trough from a springboard marked ‘Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government’ saying ‘I declare this development officially open’.
It was an indication if any were needed of how the Westferry Printworks affair has left the impression that the planning system is a ‘Tory funny money’ game of Monopoly (another cartoon two days later).
Richard Desmond’s £12,000 donation to the Conservatives may be small change but the timing shortly after housing secretary Robert Jenrick approved his plans for a £1 billion housing development still stinks.
It leaves the housing secretary looking – in the most generous interpretation of events – naïve in his dealings with the billionaire.
A look ahead to the Budget part one: the land question
Posted: November 13, 2017 Filed under: Budget, Compulsory purchase, Land, Section 106 | Tags: Churchill, Civitas, Joseph Chamberlain Leave a commentOriginally published as a column for Inside Housing on November 13.
More than ever before, this year’s Budget looks like a watershed moment for housing.
Philip Hammond is under mounting pressure from all sides to do something big and bold and break with the failed policies of the past.
The calls for something radical are coming from more than just the usual suspects and are for more than just a cheque with lots of zeros.
Conservative MPs know that they cling to power (just) thanks to the votes of elderly home owners. Brexit may dominate everything but many of them realise that beneath the surface housing is one of the key issues poisoning their relationship with the under-45s.
They understand that cynical policies like Help to Buy are no longer enough, that the party is running out of time and that it has to look at policies that were previously unthinkable.
Yet conventional wisdom says that we’ve heard all this before, that Hammond’s caution and the Treasury’s orthodoxy will turn thinking that was big and bold into outcomes that are tame and timid on November 22.
After the announcements in the last few weeks of an extra £10bn for Help to Buy, another £2bn for social housing and the u-turn on the LHA cap for social and supported housing, how much is left for the chancellor to say (or spend)?
However, another view says that the housing question has such serious social, economic and political implications that the answers cannot be put off any longer. See this blog by Toby Lloyd for a good round-up of some possibilities.
In a series of columns ahead of the Budget, I’ll be looking at some of the crucial questions concerning investment, tax and welfare and, to kick things off, land. Will the Budget be big and bold – or tame and timid?
The Housing Bill: fresh start
Posted: April 12, 2016 Filed under: Affordable housing, Planning, Section 106, Starter homes | Tags: Housing and Planning Bill Leave a commentOriginally posted on April 12 on Inside Edge 2, my blog for Inside Housing
Otto von Bismarck famously said that laws are like sausages: it is better not to see how they are made.
One exception to the Iron Chancellor’s dictum could be the way that the UK House of Lords takes the distasteful raw ingredients of legislation and improves it with new recipes.
That was certainly the case on the first day of the report stage of the Housing and Planning Bill on Monday, which saw the government twice suffer major defeats and also make a significant concession on starter homes.
As the Bill now stands, this ‘cuckoo in the nest’ of affordable housing (as Lord Best memorably called it at the committee stage) has been cut down to size a bit: the discount will be repayable over 20 years rather than eight; and local authorities will have the flexibility to decide on local needs rather than targeting virtually all section 106 contributions as starter homes. The government also accepted another amendment that will exempt rural exceptions sites from the starter home requirement.
Ministers had already moved slightly on the discount period: the Bill originally said that starter home buyers would be able to sell without repaying any of the 20% discount after five years but a consultation proposes extending that to eight years with the discount tapering away over that period.
Jules Birch 