The gap between the homes this country needs and the homes it actually delivers isn’t closing – if anything, it’s widening. There are now 1.34 million households on local authority waiting lists in England, the highest figure in over a decade. Every week a planning decision is delayed is a week a family stays on that list, or a young person stays priced out of the area they grew up in.
Yorkshire is no exception. Demand for affordable rent, shared ownership, and rent-to-buy homes remains strong, particularly among people who want to stay rooted in the communities they know but simply can’t compete in the open market. The land is often there. The willingness from landowners is often there too. What slows things down time and again is a planning system that hasn’t been resourced or reformed quickly enough to match the scale of what’s being asked of it.
None of this is a criticism of the people working within the system. Planning officers and local authorities are, in my experience, doing their best with limited capacity and resource. Many departments are working through applications with fewer staff than they had a decade ago, while the volume and complexity of what lands on their desks has only grown. That mismatch shows up everywhere – in the time it takes to validate an application, in back-and-forth over conditions resolvable earlier, and in sites sitting undeveloped for years despite consent in principle. Each delay has a knock-on effect: contractors stood down, funding agreements renegotiated, and families who wait longer for a front door of their own.
But if the country is serious about tackling the housing crisis, the system underneath needs to turn good intentions into homes on the ground, without losing sight of the quality and character of the places being built. That means proper investment in planning departments, so decisions can be made at the pace the crisis demands. It also means authorities working together across boundaries, since housing need and land supply rarely respect administrative lines on a map.
As Managing Director for Yorkshire at Adderstone Living, I see this tension play out on real sites, with real people affected. It’s part of why we take a land-led, locally-engaged approach – working closely with communities and local authorities from the earliest stages, rather than submitting an application and hoping for the best. We’d rather spend time upfront understanding what a community needs and what a site can genuinely support, than find that out through objections after submission. Done properly, early engagement is what allows developments to move smoothly through the system, rather than getting caught up in delays further down the line.
None of this needs to mean lowering standards at all. A better-resourced system can hold developers to a higher bar, with the capacity to scrutinise schemes properly rather than waving them through under pressure of backlog.
Closing the gap between ambition and delivery isn’t about shortcuts. It’s about a system fast enough, resourced enough, to match the scale of the problem it exists to solve. Yorkshire has no shortage of families who need that system to work better, or sites ready to help it happen. What’s missing is the pace to match the ambition.
– Rick Long, Managing Director for Yorkshire, Adderstone Living
