There was a particular phrase that was repeated constantly at UKREiiF last month: “Unlocking housing.”

Every discussion seemed to return to it: Unlocking sites. Unlocking growth. Unlocking regeneration. Unlocking investment. The word appeared so often it  almost stopped meaning anything specific. 

The language is optimistic, however – politically useful and deliberately frictionless. It creates the impression that Britain’s housing crisis is fundamentally a problem of policy restraint – that somewhere behind planning delays and local opposition sits a vast reserve of deliverable housing waiting to be released if only the system would get out of the way.

But the more closely you look at the reality of development in places like Cambridge, the harder that narrative becomes to sustain. Because the central constraint on housing delivery is no longer simply whether Britain can approve more homes. It is whether Britain can physically support them.

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