England's housing supply, council by council: what the new Commons Library dashboard tells you

Ask anyone renting in a pressured market how many homes were actually built in their borough last year, and you will usually get a shrug. The numbers exist, but they sit in technical government releases that few people outside the sector ever open. That gap between official statistics and everyday understanding is what the House of Commons Library is trying to close with its housing supply dashboard, which brings together the figures for every district-level and unitary local authority in England on a single, searchable page.

The dashboard covers three core measures: the total housing stock in each area broken down by tenure, the net supply of new housing, and the supply of affordable housing. Users simply select their local authority from a dropdown menu and the key statistics appear. For renters wondering whether their council is genuinely delivering, for landlords weighing where new competition will come from, and for campaigners arguing the case for more affordable homes, that is a genuinely useful starting point.

One complication the Library has had to untangle is the recent wave of local government reorganisation. New authorities were created in 2019, 2020, 2021 and 2023, and the page presents data for the district and unitary authorities that existed on 31 March 2024. Where an area now sits under a merged council, the Library has calculated totals by adding together the figures for the old district-level authorities that were combined to create it. Dorset gets its own footnote: the figures relate to the unitary authority created on 1 April 2019, rather than the former county council area of the same name.

As with any official dataset, the small print matters. Housing stock figures are rounded to the nearest ten, so totals may not sum exactly. More significantly, the data is reported by location rather than ownership: some housing sitting within one local authority's boundaries may in fact be owned by a different council, and new affordable housing supplied in one area may occasionally have been sponsored by another authority. Anyone quoting these numbers in a council chamber or a planning argument should keep that nuance in mind.

The net supply figures also include an 'other' category that deserves attention. It captures adjustments to past data to account for housing stock totals recorded in the 2021 census, as well as homes delivered through means other than new builds, conversions and change-of-use. In other words, the headline net supply figure is not simply a count of this year's completions, and it should not be read as such.

There is also a question of timeliness. The Library aims to update the dashboard in line with data releases from the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, but it cautions that the figures shown may not be the latest available. MPs and their staff can contact the Commons Library with queries about updates, and anyone who needs the information in an alternative format is invited to email papers@parliament.uk.

The timing of this resource is not incidental. The Social Housing Bill [HL] 2026-27 is scheduled to have its second reading in the House of Commons on 10 September 2026, and debates about social housing are only as strong as the evidence behind them. The Library pairs the dashboard with links to its latest data on house prices, mortgage approvals and house building across the UK, alongside an overview of current leasehold reform in England and Wales.

For readers, the practical takeaway is straightforward. If you rent, the dashboard gives you a factual anchor when your council claims progress on affordable homes. If you are a landlord or a buyer, it offers a way to gauge how much new stock is actually reaching a local market. And if you simply want to hold decision-makers to account, it hands you the same numbers they will be quoting, provided you read the footnotes as carefully as the headline figures.