Housing and planning in England

Almost every big argument in the planning system comes back to housing and planning: how many new homes an area needs, where they should go, and what happens when a council falls behind on providing them. It is the subject that drives more applications, more appeals and more headlines than any other.

This is the home for our plain-English guides to housing and planning in England. If you have ever heard an application talked about in terms of a “five year housing land supply” or a council being “out of date” and wondered what it all means for a real decision, this is the place to start. The section also covers specialist accommodation, including serviced accommodation, Airbnb and short-term lets. If you simply want to see everything in this section, use the separate Housing Index.

Why housing gets its own section

Housing has a set of rules that do not apply to anything else. The government works out how many homes each area should plan for, councils have to keep showing they have enough land to build them, and there is a national test that measures whether the homes are actually being delivered.

When a council keeps up, its own local plan tends to carry the day. When it falls behind, national policy steps in and the odds on a new housing scheme can shift markedly. These guides explain how that machinery works, in the order it usually matters.

How much housing an area needs

For plan-making, an authority starts by assessing how many homes are needed. The national local housing need and standard method calculation provides that minimum need figure, but it is not automatically the same as the housing requirement eventually set in the development plan.

The next question is where those homes could go. Our SHLAA guide explains the land-availability side of that process.

Housing land supply: what the different tests mean

“Housing land supply” is often used as if it were one calculation, but several different parts of the planning system are doing different jobs. The quickest way to navigate them is:

• Local housing need and the standard method – how many homes an area needs to plan for; this is not automatically the same as the adopted housing requirement
• SHLAA / land availability assessment – the evidence exercise which identifies and assesses land that may be suitable, available and achievable for housing; inclusion does not itself grant permission
• Five year housing land supply – the decision-making test asking whether enough deliverable housing sites can be shown against the relevant requirement
• Housing Delivery Test – looks backwards at the homes actually delivered rather than the sites expected to deliver in future
• Presumption in favour of sustainable development – the policy consequence which can become important when housing need, supply or delivery engages the current national tests

Those distinctions matter on applications and appeals. A council can have a long list of sites in its SHLAA but still fail the five-year supply test; equally, a poor Housing Delivery Test result is not the same thing as proving a shortage of deliverable sites.

Affordable, specialist and rural housing

Housing policy is not only about how many homes are delivered. Our guide to affordable housing planning explains tenure, Section 106 obligations and the current NPPF approach, while rural exception sites can provide affordable homes on land which would not normally be used for housing.

For people commissioning their own home, see self build and custom build. Truly isolated homes in the countryside face the separate HO11 tests, including rural-worker need, building reuse and exceptional design.

We also cover specialist housing for older and disabled people, students and shared living, together with the M4(2) and M4(3) accessible housing standards. Our guide to wheelchair accessible homes looks at designing for real-life use and future-proofing, while Passivhaus and planning explains how very-low-energy design fits with the NPPF and Building Regulations.

What happens when a council falls behind with their housing and planning?

This is where housing meets the wider policy system, but the August 2026 NPPF no longer uses the old rule that a housing shortfall simply switches on paragraph 11(d). Within a settlement, policy S4 already provides the current favourable balance, so a five-year supply or Housing Delivery Test failure is not needed to trigger it. Outside a settlement, policy S5 contains specific routes, including development meeting an evidenced unmet need. For housing, the Framework expressly identifies failure to demonstrate the required five-year housing land supply, including the appropriate buffer, or a latest Housing Delivery Test result below 75% as evidence that can establish that unmet need.

See our guide to the presumption in favour of sustainable development for the S4 and S5 tests. If you have an infill plot, a field or another site on the edge of a village or town, our guide to building outside a settlement boundary explains what the five year supply and HDT position can mean for the site. The tilted balance page covers the older approach and what replaced it.

If your application is refused

Housing schemes are refused all the time, and a refusal is not the end of the road. You can appeal. Our guide to planning appeals explains how that works, and our planning fees page covers what an application costs in the first place.

Other Housing Sections

Housing and Planning Page Updated: 30th August 2026