Report

Housing Outlook Q3 2025

This report from UK think tank the Resolution Foundation shows that delivering 1.5 million new homes would be a real step-change in housebuilding in England.

Welcome to our third Housing Outlook of 2025. This quarter, we show that delivering 1.5 million new homes by the end of Parliament would be a real step-change in housebuilding in England, but not game-changing when it comes to rebalancing housing supply and demand.

Since 2022, housing stock relative to population has been on the slide, and we estimate that delivering 300,000 new homes per year over the next five years is necessary to simply arrest this trend and take us back to 2021 levels. But if net additions were maintained at this rate over a ten-year period, this would lead to a significant improvement in dwellings to population, boosting the number of homes per 1,000 adults from 535 in 2024, to 554 in 2034.

The picture when it comes to affordable (i.e. sub-market) homes is less encouraging. The ratio of affordable homes per 1,000 adults in England has been consistently falling since 1980, standing at 88 in 2024, an all-time low. The Government’s new £39 billion Social and Affordable Homes Programme (SAHP) is hugely welcome, but even in a best-case scenario it would only stop this decline, with the number of affordable homes per 1,000 adults increasing ever-so slightly over ten years, to 91 per 1,000 adults in 2034.

Finally, we show that higher levels of housing stock to population correlate with lower rents, which suggests building focused in high-cost areas could have an affordability impact over time. But perhaps more pertinently, the Government should focus building in areas that are, or should be, highly productive rather than simply less affordable to boost growth as well as reduce housing cost pressures.