New dashboard for insights into urban land markets and housing growth

The urban land dashboard will help assess whether the supply of developable land for housing is responsive to demand. This understanding will support evidence-led land use planning decisions. 

Land supply constraints have been a major reason low interest rates led to rising house prices over the past 20 years. Urban land supply includes new greenfield developments on the edges of cities, and intensification on existing urban sites (brownfield developments). 

The dashboard combines two core urban land efficiency indicators with several contextual indicators to provide a high-level picture of land and housing market conditions. Urban land efficiency indicators signal whether urban land supply appears to be responding to changes in demand, while contextual indicators provide the wider market context needed to interpret those signals and support understanding of what may be driving them. 

Local knowledge is also needed alongside the dashboard to understand whether land and housing supply is keeping up with changing demand, and if enough developable capacity has been enabled in councils’ plans to support housing growth.  

For the first time, this information is available in one place, making it easier for councils, analysts and the public to understand the pressures shaping housing supply and affordability. 

We will continue to use feedback from councils to refine the dashboard over time, ahead of the rollout of the new planning system, which will place a strong emphasis on evidence-led, responsive planning decisions to support competitive and efficient  urban land markets in which a wide range of development opportunities are available to support housing growth.