Housing targets and the Cornwall housing summit

A housing summit has been organised in Cornwall.  The blurb for it is set out below.

“A major new Cornwall Housing Summit will take place on Friday 17 April 2026 at Cornwall Council’s County Hall in Truro, bringing together leaders from housing, health, skills, planning, community and business sectors to tackle Cornwall’s deepening housing crisis.

 

Cornwall has experienced years of rising house prices, soaring rents, growing waiting lists for social housing and increasing homelessness, all of which are impacting health, workforce retention and community sustainability across the county.

 

Demand for housing continues to outstrip supply, with additional pressures from second homes, short-term lets and construction cost challenges.

The Cornwall Housing Summit will be a participatory, solution-focused event, designed not only to explore the causes and consequences of the housing crisis, but to identify practical, cross-sector responses that can lead to real change.”

 

[https://researchandinnovation.co.uk/cornwall-housing-summit-announced-for-april-2026/]

 

Both central and local government have been captured by the housebuilders' lobby and the myths it is in their interest to perpetuate. This is obvious in the statement that demand has outstripped supply.  It ignores the reality that Cornwall has far more dwellings than there are households. The housing market in Cornwall caters for demand for holiday homes and holiday lets not housing need.  Rising house prices and soaring rents are not a consequence of a lack of supply.

 

The three keynote speakers are all proponents of the ‘lack of supply, we must build more houses’ mantra, which reflects a market led, developer lobby discourse rather than acknowledging the real drivers of price rises and housing problems.

 

The evidence

The table below compares the governments target with actual changes from 2021 to 2024.  The target is 2.4 times the growth in households, 1.7 times the growth in all dwellings.

 

	Annual growth
Target	4450
All dwellings	2650
Council Tax Base	2840
Households	1850

 

In 2024 there were 293,480 dwellings in Cornwall but only 256,080 households, which leaves 37,400 unoccupied dwellings.  Of these, 21,560 are in the leisure sector, 7,860 are vacant and 7,980 are unknown -[Built but not occupied?, holiday lets?.

 

Category	Nos.		2nd homes	14123
Households	256080		Holiday lets	7437
Council Tax Base	286043		Vacant	7860
All dwellings	293480		Gaps	7980
Unoccupied	37400		Sub-total	37400

 

 

The fundamental flaw of the target methodology

The new target operates on the false premise that all dwellings in an area are provided to meet local need, regardless of whether they are used for housing people or not.  It essentially accepts the use of dwellings for second home and holiday lets.  The role that supply creates its own demand is ignored. In Cornwall a range of ‘actors' operate with the aim of encouraging people to buy property in Cornwall, whether to live in or to use for second homes or holiday lets.  Developers recognise and encourage this process. This creates a situation where housing ‘need’ in Cornwall consists of two components – local housing need and demand by people who are encouraged to buy or rent property in Cornwall.

 

The other significant flaw is the mistaken notion that more houses will lead to lower house prices or at least lower prices rises.  In reality house values/prices are the consequence of several factors, the main ones being the level of interest rates and earnings.  Interest rates in the past have also been effectively reduced due to the policy of quantitative easing. The evidence suggests that increasing supply therefore would not lead to lower house prices.

 

Conclusion

The Government has adopted the assertions of the free-market development lobby, accepting flawed assumptions and adopted the discourse that supply or the lack of it is the root cause of housing problems.  As well as leading to unnecessary and unsustainable development the policy will not actually solve the problems it purports to deal with. In Cornwall it will simply lead to excessive and unsustainable housing development yet not actually help those in need.

 

Two targets - A target of no more than 2,000 new dwellings should therefore be the maximum for Cornwall, with another target of reducing the number of unoccupied dwellings.