New research from the University of Warwick suggests housebuilding is even lower than official estimates
Applications for the same site two to three years apart have been counted as separate submissions, inflating housebuilding stats
This week, Nimby Watch is paying a visit to the University of Warwick
Warwick! What a beautiful place to visit. We’ve got the River Avon, a truly historic castle – begun by William the Conqueror himself – and a beautiful series of heritage buildings. What a delight. I assume you want to bulldoze half of it? Well… hang on a second. We’re not in Warwick, we’re visiting the University of Warwick.
The picture is even worse than the official figures suggest – because it turns out the official figures contain a lot of duplication
Which, of course, is in the beautiful medieval town of Warwick. Well, it’s in a medieval settlement, certainly. It’s just not in Warwick. The ‘University of Warwick’ is, of course, in Coventry.
Wait, what? Yes, really. It’s a truly irritating – if very successful – bit of branding. Coventry did have a medieval castle, but it was demolished about 800 years ago. And it has the unusual distinction of being one of very few British cities to have lost its cathedral twice – once due to Henry VIII, and once thanks to Adolf Hitler.
Okay, I think I know why you’ve brought us to Coventry. Is this going to be about the annoying trick developers do of claiming their new homes are being built in a swanky local area, when they’re actually in a somewhat less desirable neighbourhood a few miles down the road? It would be a very neat segue if that was the case, wouldn’t it? But no, it’s just a quirk of geography that’s always annoyed me.
Wherever it is, though, the University of Warwick is an excellent institution, and researchers at its Centre for Competitive Advantage in the Global Economy have produced a fascinating bit of research on the relative success of Nimbys versus the rest of us over the last decade…
New research, you say? What have they done, then? Well, essentially, they’ve tried to build a new dataset to help analyse what’s going on with housebuilding and planning in the UK – and they’ve started by trying to estimate how many houses are getting built.
Surely we know that already? Well, you’d hope so! The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government certainly publishes figures on how many planning applications for new homes are published every year, and it’s these that form the basis of many of our housing stats – including how we assess how far we’re missing housebuilding targets by.
So…they’re just replicating work the Government is already doing? No – they’re trying a new methodology to answer the same questions. The team has, they say, compiled data from 19 million planning applications, from 400 authorities, processing more than 120 terabytes in total. That’s some seriously big data.
They’ve put the work in, then. But does it tell us anything different to the official figures we had already? Well, the broad picture is a fairly familiar one: outline applications for new homes peaked in 2014 at a little under 250,000, and have only topped 200,000 in one year since (2017).
Otherwise, the story through to 2024 has been of applications steadily falling, averaging well below 150,000 – half the target of the last Conservative government, and nowhere near achieving the 1.5m homes aspiration set out by Labour.
Is that any different from what the official stats showed? Yes and no. The broad picture is the same: the UK isn’t building enough houses, and it’s not even close to its targets. But this new research shows the picture is even worse than the official figures suggest – because it turns out the official figures contain a lot of duplication.
Duplication? No one’s going to apply for planning for the same house twice, are they? It’s not exactly a fun process. Well, no one wants to apply for planning for the same house twice, but it turns out we do this all the time – and we cover it endlessly in this very column.
A developer applies for planning one year, gets refused, changes the proposals slightly, and submits it again two or three years later. The official figures tracked if an application was a resubmission in the same year, but it didn’t track it across years – meaning that building nothing and turning down plans could actually lead to more applications appearing in the stats. This new methodology gets rid of those duplicates.
So… the new figures show even fewer planning applications than we thought? Surely the effect can’t be all that dramatic? Au contraire. Though they stress the figures aren’t directly comparable, the Government figures over the last four years are 43% higher than those produced by the University of Warwick methodology – meaning that we’re even further off building enough new homes than we thought we were. The pipeline problem – how many homes were being proposed in the first place – was a bigger factor than we realised.
Well, that doesn’t seem great. Do you have any kind of silver lining for us to cling on to? For once, I actually do! The researchers do note that the 2025 data – which follows changes the new Government made to the National Policy Planning Framework – shows a sizeable uptick in outline applications to build new homes.
The official figures show that as a 59% uptick – but the new methodology thinks it’s even bigger, meaning that a lot of the new applications are genuinely new. So it’s too early to be sure, but it seems that the UK’s housebuilding problem was even worse than we thought, but the early signs suggest planning reforms might be helping more than we thought, too.
I guess that’s something? For now, it’s all we’ve got.
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