NIMBY nation: why planning reform alone won't be enough to save us
how bad accounting, not bad planning, holds Britain hostage.
For the last few years, conversations about housing reform in Britain have meant one thing: planning reform.
Cut red tape. Build faster. Abolish the Green Belt. Do away with the NIMBYism that has for so long consumed British politics.
But what if this focus, even if broadly correct, still misses the real prize? What if the real bottleneck isn’t just in planning, but rather a political and financial barrier, hidden deep in the books?
Because the truth is, even if you waved a magic wand and reformed every planning law tomorrow, we would still not build the homes we need.
Not the right kind. Not for the people who need them.
Because Britain doesn’t just need more homes. It needs more social homes. And until we fix the way we treat public housing investment, until we stop pretending it’s pure debt, a fiscal shame, our housing crisis will only deepen.
When councils want to build homes, real homes, decent ones, for ordinary people priced out of the private market, they have to borrow. This borrowing goes onto what’s called the Housing Revenue Account (HRA). It's supposed to be a self-contained system: the rent from the homes pays back the loans. In theory, it balances.
In practice, we load it with rules that almost no other kind of borrower faces.
First, councils’ housing debt is counted against public sector net debt, the national balance sheet, the number the Chancellor is desperate to keep low to look "fiscally responsible”. It doesn't matter that these loans are attached to rental income. It doesn't matter that, for most councils, housing revenue is a reliable, solvent stream. It’s counted the same way as if the government had borrowed to cover welfare payments or pay civil servant salaries. Pure cost, no asset.
In accounting terms, it's absurd. No private developer is treated this way. If Taylor Wimpey builds 500 homes, their debt is offset by the fact they now own 500 homes. On their books, it’s an investment. A physical, income-generating asset.
But when a council builds homes, the accounting rules pretend that no asset exists; just the debt.
It’s a political decision, not a natural law, to treat public housing this way. It’s a decision that costs us all, profoundly.
The consequences are catastrophic.
Council leaders who would love to build are boxed in. Treasury rules discourage borrowing for social housing because it looks like a political liability. Any bold building program pushes up the visible "debt" figure, even though, in the real economy, it's no different from a company investing in a profitable venture.
This system is not inevitable. It's not an iron clad law of economics. It's a policy choice.
Other countries do it differently. In Austria, social landlords (many of them municipally-owned) build at scale, with debt recognised as secured against valuable, rent-paying assets. In Singapore, the government builds the vast majority of homes; high quality, affordable, and well-maintained, and recognises public housing as part of national wealth, not national debt.
But here, we strangle councils at birth. Then we ask why the housing crisis keeps getting worse.
The Resolution Foundation’s recent report shows just how detrimental this is, even to those of us who will live our entire lives without needing social housing. Because investment in social housing in the areas of greatest need doesn’t just address hardship, it drives outsized economic growth. It multiplies opportunity. It lets people move, work, live where they can thrive.
The analysis, which uses the number of households per 1,000 in temporary accommodation in a local authority area as a proxy for social housing need, finds that building social homes in areas of high housing need is also consistent with expanding housing supply in the higher productivity areas of England. Expanding housing supply in high productivity areas will be key to achieving the Government’s growth mission.
Social homes don’t just “cost” money. They generate it.
And this is before we even touch on the cost of not having enough.
Today, over 160,000 children are growing up in temporary accommodation in Britain. That's the highest number since records began. In London right now, 1 in every 24 children is growing up in temporary accommodation.
In one of the richest economies in the world, 160,000 children are sleeping in hotel rooms; in B&Bs, in poor quality housing stock never intended for long term habitability, shuffled between short leases without warning.
The long-term impacts are brutal.
Children in temporary accommodation are more likely to fall behind at school, suffer from chronic mental health conditions, and struggle to find stable work later in life.
This isn't "bad luck." It's built into the system we’ve allowed to fester.
Imagine if we took a different approach.
In Finland, they treat housing as a human right. They made it a constitutional guarantee, not just an aspiration but a duty of the state.
The result? Finland has virtually ended homelessness, saved money on emergency services, and created a more stable, productive society.
When you guarantee homes, you guarantee futures.
Meanwhile in Britain, we are not even standing still.
We are losing social homes faster than we are building them.
Right now, every year, more council homes are sold off under Right to Buy than are built to replace them.
The net loss since 2010 is staggering: over 200,000 homes gone from the public stock.
Many of these sold-off homes now show up in the private rental market, sometimes let back to councils at double or triple the original rent, draining public funds.
Councils are now paying billions to private landlords every year to house people they could have housed in social homes, if they had been allowed to build.
Meanwhile, crisis services, from homelessness shelters to mental health emergency response, are stretched to breaking point, precisely because people don't have stable places to live.
Every pound spent on crisis management is a pound not spent on prevention.
We are locked into a system where we pay more to fail than we would to succeed.
The good news is that 2025 gives us an opportunity to change course.
The Spending Review due this June could start to fix this, if it’s brave enough.
It could reclassify council housebuilding as an investment, rather than pure debt. It could set an ambitious national target for net new social homes, not just private supply. It should redirect budgets away from short-term landlord subsidies, and towards long-term public investment.
Orthodox approaches to economic costing often split investment spend into ‘social spending’ (social programmes) and ‘economic spending’ (infrastructure). But an investment in social housing is both. It’s social spending yes - it offers a form of welfare to some of the most economically disadvantaged in Britain - a subsidised place to live. But it’s economic spending also - housing is infrastructure, an asset, a long term investment that helps to address living standards and labour market pressures alike.
Imagine a Britain where councils could borrow prudently against future rent revenue, build thousands of homes, and know they wouldn’t be punished for it in national debt statistics. Imagine city centres revitalised with workers who can afford to live nearby, children growing up in stable homes, communities built on something stronger than speculation.
It’s not utopian. It’s accounting.
Change the rules, and you change the possibilities.
We don’t have to accept a system where public investment is treated as financial delinquency. We can tell the truth: that homes built by councils are not burdens. They are wealth. They are security. They are a future.
We can choose to count what matters.