Research suggests public land sell off is not providing affordable homes

There has been a lot made of the fact that public land sale, such as from the NHS, is being used to build new houses but new research suggests they are not affordable for many. For example, of the planned homes to be built for sale on NHS land, some 67% will be unaffordable to a nurse on an average salary, according to a new analysis published by the New Economics Foundation. The average sale prices of many houses built on NHS land is 9.6 times the average annual salary of a nurse at £306,434. At present 5% of the homes built on sold-off NHS land will be for genuinely affordable social rent with 30% of sites having no plans for affordable housing at all. The looks at 23 sites the NHS declared ‘surplus’ in England in the last year, and it shows that the sale of NHS land is fundamentally failing to produce the affordable homes needed and suggests it is exacerbating the deep affordability crisis across the UK.