The government's planning reforms are now law, the target is 1.5 million new homes this Parliament, and the logic sounds simple: build more, and prices come down. If you're weighing up whether to buy or sell now versus waiting for that promised wave of new supply to soften the market, it's worth understanding what the reforms actually change — and why the relationship between housebuilding and house prices is far less direct than it sounds.
What's actually changed so far
The Planning and Infrastructure Bill has passed and become law, giving councils legally-binding local housing targets and removing some of the previous blockages around "grey belt" land — lower-quality green belt sites, often on the edge of existing towns, that can now be released for development more easily than genuine open countryside. A revised National Planning Policy Framework sits alongside it, aimed at speeding up approvals and reducing the delays that have historically slowed delivery.
On the numbers, progress is real but behind pace. Official figures show around 392,400 net additional homes delivered in England between the start of this Parliament in July 2024 and mid-2026 — roughly a quarter of the 1.5 million target, with building starts up 18% and completions up 3% year-on-year in early 2026. The government's own housing department has projected that, on current trends, the country will reach around 1.1 million homes by 2028/29 rather than the full 1.5 million — meaning delivery would need to accelerate significantly to hit the original goal.
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Book a valuationWhy more supply rarely means quick price falls
The assumption that more homes automatically means cheaper homes only really holds in the very long run, and even then only partially. Two things get in the way in the short and medium term.
The first is simple lag. A planning permission granted today doesn't become a lived-in home for two, three, sometimes five years once site preparation, infrastructure, build phasing and sales rates are factored in. Housebuilders also build to demand, not against it — most developers release new homes in phases matched to how quickly buyers are actually purchasing at current prices, not at a pace designed to undercut the market.
The second is precedent. Economic evidence submitted to Parliament's own inquiries into the housing market points to previous building booms — notably in Ireland and Spain before the 2008 financial crisis — where large increases in housebuilding ran alongside rapidly rising prices, not falling ones, because demand and "agglomeration" effects (people wanting to live near jobs, schools and amenities that already exist) outweighed the extra supply. Supply and demand do eventually rebalance, but the evidence is that it happens over a much longer horizon than most housing policy debates suggest.
Every housebuilding boom on record has taken years, not months, to show up in prices — if it shows up at all in the areas people actually want to live.
What it looks like specifically in Northumberland
National reform lands unevenly, and Northumberland is a good example of why. Much of the county sits inside the Northumberland National Park or an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty along the coast — both largely protected from the grey belt release that's doing most of the practical work in this round of reform. The land most affected by grey belt policy tends to be lower-grade green belt on the fringes of major cities, which is far more relevant to somewhere like Newcastle's commuter belt than to rural Northumberland itself.
That means local housing targets and delivery in towns like Morpeth, Alnwick, Ponteland, Cramlington, Amble and Blyth will keep being driven far more by what's actually being built and sold in those specific towns than by a national policy shift. Where local supply stays tight relative to demand — as it has in most of our priority towns — prices tend to hold firm regardless of the national conversation about a 1.5 million home target.
What this means if you're buying or selling now
Waiting for planning reform to meaningfully soften prices means betting on a policy outcome that independent trackers already show running behind its own timetable, in a form of housing (new-build, often in different locations to existing stock) that doesn't necessarily compete directly with the character properties and established homes that make up most of Northumberland's market. Meanwhile, the actual market keeps moving. The properties we take to market average 14 days to sale agreed against a national average of 77 days — a gap driven by how a sale is run today, not by macro housing policy.
If reform does eventually change the picture, it will do so gradually and mostly in different pockets of the market to where you're likely buying or selling. Making a decision based on today's real conditions, rather than a hoped-for shift that current data suggests is still years away, remains the more reliable approach.
