The System
The housing crisis is not an accident, it is an output. These pieces take the system apart one component at a time: where housing is allowed to go, what land is worth and who keeps the difference, what actually gets built, and what is meant to arrive alongside it. No jargon, no assumed knowledge, just how the machine runs.
The planning system was rewritten to say yes, and the state is now financing every link in the chain.
Since July 2024 the government has restored mandatory housing targets, made the presumption in favour of development permanent and moved planning decisions away from committees. Alongside that, a change to the fiscal rules let it lend, guarantee and invest in housing on a scale grants never allowed. This is how the two halves fit together, and who carries the risk.
Your First Home, and why a housing target runs through the mortgage market.
On 26 September the government announced a 20% equity loan for first-time buyers of new homes, and called it a stimulus for the market. Homes are built at the speed they can be sold. This is how the scheme fits the machinery that sets that speed, and what the last scheme like it did.
Who is still consulted on a planning application, and the clock on their advice.
On 17 August the government confirmed it will narrow the list of bodies a council must consult, with regulations to follow, and the new framework told councils not to wait for advice past the deadline. The bodies that carry the most weight in an objection were left alone, which is the part worth knowing.
Migration, asylum dispersal and rural housing targets, and what the tables actually show.
A widely held explanation for why rural England is being told to build is that the homes are for people arriving from elsewhere. The figures are all published, so the claim can be tested rather than argued about. In one district the answer is unusually clear, and it is not the answer either side expects.
The Building Safety Levy, and why it costs twice as much on a green field.
From 1 October 2026 almost every new housing scheme in England carries a new charge, calculated per square metre. On land that has never been built on, the rate is exactly twice the rate on land that has. Here is where that money actually comes from.
Water scarcity and housing targets, and the figure everyone is quoting from last year.
61,600 homes in the East and South East cannot be built because there is not enough water. That number is real, it is serious, and it was published in January 2025. It has been recycled as current all summer, and nobody appears to have refreshed it.
How land gets its value, and who keeps it.
The arithmetic underneath the English housing crisis.
The infrastructure that doesn't exist yet.
How water, roads, schools, and GP surgeries are supposed to arrive alongside new housing, and why they don't.
The Local Plan, and why most of England does not have one.
The document that decides where houses go, how it gets made, what happens when it fails, and what happens without it.
Viability, density, and why every estate looks the same.
The product range, the economics behind it, and a planning system that cannot demand anything better.