New affordable homes

The New affordable homes report provides detailed retrospective analysis of the new homes built by Registered Providers in England over the period 1989 to 2009.

The research, funded jointly by the Tenant Services Authority and the HCA in February 2010, was carried out by a team drawn from the Universities of Sheffield and Cambridge and the London School of Economics. The research used a wide range of data to investigate in detail what new homes were built by England’s Registered Providers, where these were located and who rented or bought them. In particular, the research:

• Looked in detail at the types and sizes of new homes that were constructed and how these changed over time
• Mapped where all these homes were built at the postcode level across the whole of England and linked this to new analyses of social deprivation and tenure mix
• Used anonymous data on tenants analysed who were being allocated these new homes or who bought new low cost homes, including the social, economic and demographic characteristics of the households that moved into them

The research showed four major trends in what was built and who was housed:

1. By the end of the period two bedroom flats accounted for nearly half of all new output and overall planning densities on development sites had also increased. A smaller proportion of what was built was in the form of houses and both very small and very large flats. This mirrors a similar trend in the private sector.
2. Nearly four in 10 new homes built by housing associations in 2009 were for low-cost home ownership compared with one in 10 two decades ago. Few of these were bought by existing housing association tenants.
3. An increasing proportion of those who moved into new rented homes were existing housing associations tenants, those in work, and smaller younger households, especially in London.
4. Only a quarter of new housing association homes are being built in areas dominated by social housing. The vast majority are either in areas of low deprivation, built by private developers as part of mixed communities, or in the areas of the greatest deprivation, built as part of public sector-led regeneration programmes which include low-cost homes to buy as well as to rent.

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Appendices - (720 KB PDF)