Publications about housing supply strategy

The central recommendation of The Barker Review of Housing Supply was that there should be a step change in housing supply. The review also contained a number of further recommendations, including:

affordability targets to drive the planning system
planning reform to reflect the market
increasing investment in infrastructure using Planning-gain Supplement
incentives for local authorities and more social housing

The Government's response to the Barker Review of Housing Supply (external link) was published on 5 December 2005 and signalled the Government's commitment to build more homes for future generations by bringing forward an ambitious package of measures to reform the planning system and deliver increased investment in infrastructure to support sustainable housing growth.

The response responded to Kate Barker's central recommendation by setting out an ambition to increase housing supply to 200,000 per year by 2016. The full document (and the Planning-gain Supplement consultation) is available on the HM Treasury website.

Housing and Planning Delivery Grant: Consultation Paper set out proposals for developing a Housing and Planning Delivery Grant (HPDG). It was launched on 25 July 2006 and closed on 17 October 2006. The remit of a new HPDG would be to incentivise and facilitate local authorities to deliver a step change in housing supply to achieve the Government's ambition of 200,000 new homes per year.

The Government recognised that it was necessary to base its response to the Barker Review on analysis of the highest quality. Government Response to Kate Barker's Review of Housing Supply: The Supporting Analysis provides a summary of two reports which were the outputs of two major studies commissioned to provide the necessary evidence base on the benefits and impacts of various levels of additional housing supply. It presents an outline of the methodologies used and outlining the key results.

Affordability Targets: Implications for Housing Supply (Main report and Technical Annex)
In the run up to publication of the Government's response to the Barker Review, the Department commissioned a team of experts, headed by Geoffrey Meen, Professor of Applied Economics and Head of the Department of Economics at the University of Reading Business School, to consider the links between affordability targets and regional housing numbers.

The project developed a nine-region model to examine the relationship between housing supply and affordability (specified as the ratio of lower quartile house prices to lower quartile earnings). For the first time this allowed modelling, nationally and regionally, of the relationship between housing supply and affordability. Previous analyses looked only at prices at national level and were not able to take into account the interactions between the demographics and housing and labour markets.

The follow-up report Recent Developments in the Communities and Local Government Affordability Model published 26 June 2008, outlined the latest developments. In particular, the model not only can assess the impact of additional housing supply on affordability, but also how changes in affordability feed through to future levels of homeownership, vacant houses and demolitions.

A sustainability impact study of additional housing scenrios in England was jointly funded and commissioned by ODPM and Defra, to address the gap in knowledge with regards to the consequences, scale and significance of the sustainability implications of additional house building.

It built on the previous Defra study (Entec et al., 2004) which developed an approach to assessing environmental impacts associated with the Barker Review house building scenarios.

This study assessed social, economic and environmental factors absent from the previous Defra study, and considered these impacts at varying spatial levels for varying house building scenarios.

It also provided a more comprehensive and in-depth assessment and valuation of these impacts than was attempted in the previous Defra study.