🧩 Key Concepts
- Affordability Ratio: How expensive houses are compared to people’s earnings.
- Housing Supply: Homes that are actually built.
- Housing Demand: How many homes are needed.
- Land Banking: Developers getting permission but not building.
- Allocated Land: Land marked for housing in the Local Plan but not used yet.
- Windfall Development: Speculative, often unplanned housing that jumps the queue.
- EHDC’s Powers (Mₑₕdc): Tools East Hampshire District Council can use to manage all this.
- Used Powers (Uₑₕdc): The tools the council is actually using.
🧰 What Powers Does EHDC Have?
EHDC has a lot of tools it could use to make sure houses get built on time, and to stop developers from gaming the system, such as:
- Releasing land in stages only when infrastructure (like roads and schools) is ready.
- Making clear in planning policy that land-banking is discouraged.
- Setting conditions in planning permissions that require timely building.
- Naming and shaming slow developers in public reports.
- Replacing land that isn’t being used with new, better-performing sites.
- Only giving new sites to developers with good past delivery records.
- Asking national government for more power to act on land-banking.
🧠 What’s the Logic?
The government sets local housing targets partly based on how expensive homes are (compared to income). If not enough homes get built, prices go up—and the target gets even higher.
EHDC has the power to help improve this by making sure:
- Land with planning permission actually gets used,
- Developers stop sitting on land and waiting for values to rise,
- Speculative “extra” applications aren’t rewarded,
- And local housing supply starts catching up with demand.
But EHDC hasn’t used all the tools at its disposal.
So what happens?
- Developers delay building (land banking continues),
- Speculative developments get approved anyway,
- New homes don’t get built fast enough,
- House prices keep rising faster than wages,
- The “affordability uplift” in the government’s formula kicks in,
- And EHDC’s housing targets go up.
✅ Conclusion (Plainly Stated)
Rising housing targets in East Hampshire aren’t just the fault of national government or the housing market. EHDC is helping cause the problem by not using all the powers it has to:
- Make sure homes get built when they’re supposed to,
- Discourage speculative building,
- And manage how housing supply affects prices.
In short, EHDC’s inaction is part of the reason housing targets keep going up.