What It Will Take to Deliver 20,000 Social Homes by 2030
The Welsh Government’s commitment to deliver 20,000 additional social homes by March 2030 is an important ambition.
Housing need is clear. Homelessness and the use of temporary accommodation remain under pressure and Wales needs more genuinely affordable homes.
But setting a target and creating 20,000 deliverable homes are different things. Homes are not delivered nationally, they are delivered one site at a time.
Every new home needs land, planning permission, drainage, utilities, finance and people to build it. Somebody also has to coordinate those requirements and carry the development risk between identifying an opportunity and handing over a completed home.
That is where much of the challenge lies; Acquiring homes and creating homes.
The Welsh Government has deliberately defined the 20,000-home target broadly. Newly constructed homes can count, but so can suitable existing properties acquired by councils or housing associations and made available for affordable rent.
There is good reason for that flexibility. If a family is living in temporary accommodation today, acquiring an appropriate existing property can provide a secure home considerably faster than identifying land and taking a new development through planning and construction.
But acquisition and development do different things. Acquiring an existing home can increase the supply of social housing. Building a new home increases the overall supply of housing. Wales needs both.
That distinction becomes more important as we approach March 2030. Success should not only be measured by the number of qualifying homes delivered by the target date, but by the development pipeline sitting behind them.
The homes we need in 2031, 2032 and 2033 need to be progressing now.
There is often discussion about releasing more public land for housing. Public land can make an important contribution, but privately owned land will also be needed if Wales is going to deliver at the scale required.
In either case, identifying land is only the beginning. Access, drainage, ecology, utilities, ground conditions and infrastructure can all determine whether an apparently suitable site is actually deliverable.
Strategic agreements, realistic landowner expectations and proportionate early due diligence allow those questions to be understood before significant public or private money is committed. They also allow sites which don’t work to be identified early.
A credible housing pipeline therefore needs to be more than a schedule of land. It needs to become a pipeline of understood, controlled and increasingly de-risked development opportunities, and partnership needs to begin earlier.
Housing development already involves organisations with different capabilities. Local authorities understand housing need and provide the planning framework. Housing associations bring development experience, access to funding and long-term stewardship, landowners provide the land, consultants bring specialist expertise, funders provide capital and builders and their supply chains turn plans into homes.
Developers can sit between those organisations; identifying opportunities, securing land, establishing planning strategy, coordinating technical due diligence and creating a structure capable of moving a project towards delivery.
The opportunity is to connect those capabilities earlier. Traditionally, a developer may secure land, design a scheme, obtain planning permission and then approach a housing association regarding the affordable homes. There will be plenty of developments where that remains the right approach.
But where a larger proportion of a development may ultimately become affordable housing, there is an argument for involving the eventual housing partner much earlier. That allows housing need, tenure, specification, funding and delivery to be considered while the scheme can still respond to them. It also means development risk can be understood and shared rather than simply transferred at the end of the process.
There isn’t one structure that will work everywhere. A landowner may control a suitable site, a developer may secure planning and remove technical risk, a housing association may acquire and manage the homes and public and private finance may fund delivery. Elsewhere, a council or housing association may already own the land and need development expertise to help unlock it.
What matters is getting the right people around the opportunity early enough to influence the outcome.
Development plans provide an important framework for identifying where new homes should be created. They give communities, landowners and delivery partners greater certainty about where future growth is expected.
The Planning (Wales) Act 2026 provides a clearer legislative framework. Turning that framework into completed homes also requires well-prepared applications, adequately resourced teams and early technical input.
The development industry has a responsibility here too; Bringing forward poorly understood sites and expecting the planning process to resolve problems that should have been identified earlier doesn’t help anybody.
Good planning, supported by good development work before an application is submitted, should create greater certainty for everyone involved.
Housing also needs infrastructure, and understanding those requirements early allows costs and responsibilities to form part of the development strategy rather than being discovered when a project is already advanced.
The same applies to skills; Wales needs the professional teams to design and approve developments and the construction workforce to build them. Those skills cannot be switched on and off according to annual housing targets.
Businesses invest in people, apprentices and equipment when they can see a dependable pipeline of future work. Confidence in what happens after 2030 therefore matters too.
Public investment will remain fundamental, and long-term funding certainty matters because development projects routinely span several financial years. But capital alone cannot create housing and funding needs something to fund.
That means deliverable projects: land controlled, planning risk understood, infrastructure assessed, costs established and a delivery structure capable of taking the scheme forward.
The proposed role of Unnos could be important if it helps connect those elements, improves access to finance and helps councils and housing associations unlock opportunities. Its greatest contribution may not be doing what existing organisations already do. It may be helping those organisations work together more effectively.
What should success look like in March 2030? Twenty thousand additional social homes would be a significant achievement. But I would judge the programme against something else as well.
What does the pipeline look like on 31 March 2030? Have we created more deliverable land and become better at resolving development constraints? Have councils, housing associations, developers and funders created relationships and structures that can be used again? And are thousands more homes already moving towards delivery beyond the target?
If the answer is yes, the programme will have achieved something more valuable than a number. It will have increased Wales’s long-term capacity to provide homes.
The housing challenge won’t be solved by one organisation, one funding stream or one change in policy. It will be solved site by site, by people and organisations bringing different skills to the same problem, understanding risk and finding a deliverable way forward.
Twenty thousand homes is the target; A stronger development pipeline should be the legacy.
We welcome enquiries and comment if you would like to take this conversation further with Huw.