South and Vale recognise that overall housing delivery is critical to achieving their objectives and the two Councils have ambitious plans for developing new homes, including the realisation of the Didcot Garden Town vision. The Study Brief calls for an assessment of different approaches to ensuring that the planned level of housing growth is actually delivered in the required timescale as set out in Local Plans. This will require an acceleration of delivery rates compared to those achieved in the recent past.

At its simplest, there are four fundamental explanations for the consistent failure of the UK housebuilding sector to deliver fewer homes than identified through the plan-led system, in whatever guise this has taken (Structure Plans, Regional Plans, Local Plans). First, all the plan-led approaches focus on what is the overall number of homes needed, given population projections and other considerations, and not the level of market demand and the funding available to deliver subsidised housing. New homes have to be paid for either by those buying the properties or, if households are unable to afford a home, then government subsidy is required. Not since the period 1950 to 1979, a period in which the public sector was consistently building around 70,000 homes a year, has there been sufficient public subsidy to build new homes for all those who cannot afford to purchase a home with a mortgage; and it is only since the late 1990s that a new generation of landlords have bought properties for commercial renting on any scale.