Current high housing costs are driving down home-ownership and driving up pressures on government expenditure – from lengthening social housing waiting lists to rising housing benefits. Meanwhile social housing policies are reducing employment and increasing poverty among social tenants.

This report draws from a wide range of data and sources to analyse how we have got where we are in housing. It then sets out reforms that can save over £100 billion over the next five years, whilst simultaneously helping millions achieve their goal of home-ownership and breaking the poverty trap currently facing social tenants.

Making Housing Affordable sets out a new vision for housing policy based on expanding home-ownership. Key themes are a shi away from top-down planning to a focus on housing affordability, a more consensual planning system to enable the building of more new homes and so lower housing costs, greater help for social tenants and low income households to own, reforming the incentives facing social tenants, and a new funding model for social housing.

Making Housing Affordable is the first of three possible reforms that together could save the government £40 billion a year.

Awards

This report won Prospect magazine’s Think Tank Publication of the Year 2010 award for its “fresh, thorough and ambitious set of proposals for radically overhauling housing and planning policy in this country.” You can read more here.