Conversely, much of the largest public landholding sits in authorities already meeting or surpassing their housing targets, including Leeds, Wandsworth, Waltham Forest, Newcastle and Nottingham. Together identified only five authorities — Birmingham, Bristol, Bradford, Lewisham and Kirklees — that combine a serious housing deficit with a meaningful public land holding.
LOCAL AUTHORITY REGION DELIVERY SHORTFALL
| Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole | South West | ~4,550 |
| Greenwich | London | ~3,880 |
| Newham | London | ~2,870 |
| Leicester | East Midlands | ~2,280 |
| Sandwell | West Midlands | ~2,220 |
| Thurrock | East of England | ~2,020 |
| Southend-on-Sea | East of England | ~1,980 |
| Basildon | East of England | ~1,760 |
| Portsmouth | South East | ~1,660 |
| Southampton | South East | ~1,580 |
Delivery shortfall = homes required minus homes delivered over the latest Housing Delivery Test window. None of the above appears among the 20 authorities with the most public land. Source: Searchland.
“Building on vacant public land is a sensible idea, but our analysis shows it can only ever be part of the answer,” said Ryan Etchells (pictured right), chief commercial officer at Together. “There isn’t enough public land to deliver a programme this size, and that’s before considering that the places with the greatest need tend to have the least land. As it stands, whether this pledge reaches your community is close to a postcode lottery.
“The areas falling furthest behind won’t be rescued by land the state happens to own. They need sites to be assembled and bought, existing land intensified, and the wider public estate brought into play — and all of that needs finance that moves quickly and understands complex, non-standard sites.
“If the ambition is genuinely national, the plan has to look well beyond vacant public land, otherwise many of the families on today’s waiting lists will be left exactly where they are.”
Together noted that a programme built on scattered brownfield plots — typically sized for one to 50 homes — would fall largely to small and medium-sized (SME) builders and regional contractors rather than volume housebuilders. Access to finance, it argued, represents the single biggest constraint on SME developers after planning, with mainstream banks having retreated from SME development lending following the 2008 financial crisis.