Housing facts and figures

Our affordable housing policy seeks to ensure all developments creating one unit or more deliver a minimum of 25% of the housing as social rented housing and a further 10% as intermediate housing, preferably on-site. These two types of housing are collectively referred to as affordable housing. Intermediate housing covers various types of housing products including shared ownership and London Living Rent. This is calculated by habitable rooms in order to maximise the delivery of affordable housing. For this reason, the figures below are given in terms of habitable rooms to demonstrate performance against our policy targets.

A habitable room is defined as a room with a window within a dwelling that is intended to be used for sleeping, living, cooking or dining, regardless of what it is actually used for. This excludes enclosed spaces such as bath or toilet facilities, corridors, landings, hallways, lobbies, utility rooms, and kitchens with an overall floor area of less than 11sqm. Full details can be found in the Southwark Plan 2022.

It's important to look at the affordable housing proportion in gross approval terms because the minimum 35% affordable housing policy is calculated on the gross delivery of new homes on a site.

It is important to look at the affordable housing delivery over a longer timeframe. This is due to the way the source monitoring system records units lost and the long-term nature of large regeneration schemes.

Between 2004 and 2020, 9,770 affordable homes were delivered, with an annual average of 611 units. The affordable housing delivery was an equivalent of 42% total new homes generated from major developments.