Nikhil Datta
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nikdatta.bsky.social
Nikhil Datta
@nikdatta.bsky.social
Economist. Assistant prof @ warwick, fellow @ CEP LSE, PhD alum @ UCL. Child of immigrants. Serene since 17/06/06. http://nikhil-datta.com
Assessment Tool. Scottish Local Planning Authorities prepare a Local Housing Strategy based on local Housing Need and Demand Assessments. We take these different systems into account when we discuss housing targets in
section 4.4." Page 6. Not sure you read it very well.
November 20, 2025 at 2:07 PM
"This table shows the history of housing target policies only for England. Wales and Scotland have devolved housing delivery policies with Welsh Local Planning Authorities setting housing numbers in their Local Development Plans informed by the Welsh government’s Local Housing Market...
November 20, 2025 at 2:07 PM
Commenting on an article having not read it is quite a basic error, but not uncommon.
“In practice we use separate gaps for England, Scotland and Wales, aggregated from LA targets which amount to England - 371994, Scotland - 20045 and Wales - 9879 homes per year.“ Page 37.
November 20, 2025 at 1:12 PM
We don’t include flood zone mapping or geographical limitations- only planning designations. If you think of interest to policy makers we can look at incorporating in future iterations.
November 11, 2025 at 12:45 PM
Any interested stakeholders (policymakers, planners, developers etc) feel free to get in touch. We have also produced 350 LA specific reports accessible here: www.warwick.ac.uk/cage/whereto....
Where to Build
www.warwick.ac.uk
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
Looking at detailed evidence on planning restrictiveness, we find that Bexley, Lewisham, and Wandsworth combine high housing gaps with slow, restrictive planning systems. These areas urgently need reform. In contrast, Manchester, Leeds, and Birmingham show high demand and efficient planning.
12/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
We then turn to planning designations. 15% of the gap lies in Greenbelt areas – but it’s very concentrated. Allowing building on just 10% of England’s greenbelts with the highest gap would be a huge positive. This particularly pronounced around the North and Northwest. 11/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
To meet Britain’s housing gap, around 50% of new homes need to come from densification—especially in Wandsworth, Islington, Camden, Manchester, Bristol, Salford, Edinburgh & Portsmouth. Another 30% should be urban extensions like North Shields and South London (Richmond–Kingston).
10/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
Arguably the most important finding is that 96% of the variation is within LAs rather than between. Many LAs have areas of both high and low gaps. Croydon for example has OAs in the top 6th percentile and bottom 1st percentile. 9/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
The areas with the highest housing gaps are in trendy urban centres, all classed as densification. Those with the lowest gaps cluster near sewage plants, airports, major roads, or in places lacking basic amenities—where few people want to live. 8/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
We use 20 billion Rightmove searches and housing availability data to build our key measure of excess demand—the housing gap: the difference between how many people search for homes in an area and how many are available. We calculate this at the OA level – essentially a neighbourhood. 7/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
The proportion of densification has fallen over the past 2 decades, while urban extensions have grown along with small town extensions. We show that urban extensions are slower and more bureaucratic, with longer planning times and slower build-out rates compared to densification. 6/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
We then classify every new build by where it happened—combining settlement size, distance to the city centre, and local context:
New Rural Developments – small villages & rural areas
Small Town Extensions – around small towns
Urban Extensions – city outskirts
Densification – inner-city builds
5/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
70% of new builds have worse than average job access than the existing housing stock, and this figure is even worse when considering only public transport. 4/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
18% of all new builds are now in rural villages or small towns without a secondary school or GP up from 11% in 2010. 3/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM
In the report we start by asking where has Britain built? Using data on 3.2 million builds over the past two decades we document that many new homes are built in low-demand areas with poor amenities and worse than average access to jobs. 2/n
November 11, 2025 at 11:39 AM