At £306,434, the average sale prices of many houses built on NHS land is 9.6 times the average annual salary of a nurse, research by the New Economics Foundation (NEF) reveals.

A resulting report recommends introducing an ‘NHS Land community-lock’ where any land asset sold by the NHS through choice, necessity or obligation can only be used for community benefit.

To the NEF this sees the community served by the NHS Trust benefiting from the sale of an asset and those working for the NHS Trust able to purchase or rent homes on the land.

This is part of a wider recommendation to create a ‘People’s Land Bank’ which would hold surplus public sites to be used strategically in partnership with communities to meet their needs for affordable housing.

The NEF stats show that, at present, 5% of the homes built on sold-off NHS land will be for genuinely affordable social rent with 30% of sites having no plans for affordable housing at all.

The analysis examined 23 sites the NHS declared ‘surplus’ in England in the last year to see the sale of NHS land as fundamentally failing to produce the affordable homes needed.

There are currently 1.2 million English households on the waiting list for social housing, but the NEF report says the majority of homes built on NHS land will be out of reach to those who most need them.

Hanna Wheatley, Researcher at the New Economics Foundation, branded the government’s approach to public land sales as a “shambles”.

“There is a clear tension between trying to raise as much money as possible from the land sale and also building the kind of homes we need – and right now the government isn’t doing either.

“The one-off cash injection gained by selling land to the highest bidder is small compensation for the lost opportunity of more affordable housing, and a reduction in the housing benefit bill,” said Wheatley.

“Both the moral and economic cases are clear – if the Government insists on privatising the ever decreasing commons of land that we all own, they must think clearly about what that land is used for, and a massive increase the supply of affordable housing should be top of the list,” she said.

The NHS is selling off land as part of the Government’s Public Land for Housing Programme, which has the dual aim of releasing enough land for 160,000 homes by 2020, and raising £5 billion in capital receipts.

A recent National Audit Office report found that the government is currently expected to fall almost 100,000 homes short of this target by 2020.

There is also little planning for the types of homes being built – so much so that MHCLG do not collect or publish data on the number of affordable homes built. Further, MHCLG has not published an annual report on the land for new homes programme since February 2017.

When NEF requested this information through FoI, the information was denied.

In 2016 a survey by the Royal College of Nursing found that 40% of nurses in London plan to leave the capital within 5 years, because of the cost of housing.

The average RCN member spent 50% of their take home pay on housing and transport.

Despite this, when NEF looked at the two large NHS sites in London with planning permission for development in 2017/18, none of the homes being built for sale would be at a price affordable to nurses.

The two sites are:

  • Thorpe Coombe Hospital, Waltham Forest, where, according to NEF, it would take an average nurse over a century to afford the deposit for a market-rate home at the site of Thorpe Coombe Hospital, which is being redeveloped into 91 homes

The London Plan requires 50% affordable housing on public land, and the council also has a borough-wide target of 50% affordable housing on new build developments, however the scheme has been approved with no affordable housing.

  • Ealing Hospital where it would take 93 years for an average nurse to save for a deposit for a market-rate home on the site of Ealing Hospital

With 45% ‘affordable housing’, on paper this site looks closer to meeting the London Plan requirement of 50%, but in reality 30% will be for shared ownership, completely out of reach for many Londoners, and only 8% will be for genuinely affordable social rent, NEF says.

Overall, NEF analysis, examined in detail the planning documents for the 23 NHS sites declared ‘surplus’ in England in 2017-18 that have the capacity for over 80 homes,

At those sites the NEF found:

  • *3% of the homes being built on NHS land will be for market sale. The remaining 17% of proposed houses are classified as ‘affordable’ but less than a third of these are for genuinely affordable social rent, with many of the rest at 80% of market rent, or for shared ownership.
  • Only 5% of the homes built on sold-off NHS land will be for genuinely affordable social rent.
  • 30% of the sites have plans for no affordable housing at all, and 61% have plans that include no socially rented housing – widely understood as the only housing that is genuinely affordable to people on low incomes.
  • Of the planned homes to be built for sale on NHS land, two thirds will be unaffordable to a nurse on an average salary. And where they could afford the mortgage repayments, a nurse would have to save for an average of 35 years to afford the deposit
  • The average expected sale price for these new homes, based on area estimates, is £306,434 – 9.6 times the average annual salary of a nurse