Jump on board

The reason for this is simple: the vast majority of problems faced by residents of - and professionals in - social housing would be eased by building more homes. There are a variety of well-documented reasons for the fact that housing starts across the UK have dropped by 100,000 to 116,540 in the past three years, but we believe it is within the gift of the housing sector to turn this around.

Again, this might sound odd at a time when the public house building purse strings are being tightened in Scotland, Wales, Northern Ireland and England, but bear with me. By launching our new campaign, Get on our land, we are calling on public and private landowners, developers, house builders, contractors, consultants, social landlords, councillors, residents’ groups and more to commit to do all they can to bring forward land for housing development.

As the campaign progresses we will be exploring all aspects of the development process and working with our backers to compile a charter which will identify the key stumbling blocks and what the housing sector can do to overcome these. At the heart of this is land and we will focus particularly on how public and private sector landowners can release more sites for house building.

In our construction and development special this week we highlight how developing housing associations in England are rising to the challenge of building more with less through the £1.8 billion affordable rent programme. However, as our round table discussion in association with Hunters found, providers are concerned about how homes will be built once the affordable rent regime ends in 2015.

As part of the campaign we want to hear from you about what your organisation is doing to ensure difficult sites are unlocked. Whether it’s compromising on a tricky planning gain deal, securing new sources of funding, or successfully working to win the support of residents, we want to hear from you. We want to help the sector shout out loud: ‘Get on our land!’