No homes for nurses: How NHS land is being sold off to build unaffordable homes

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The Government’s sale of NHS land is failing to produce affordable homes and is exacerbating the affordability crisis across the UK.

We’ve examined the NHS sites that have been sold so far under the Government’s public land sale programme. These include hospitals, community health centres and other health service infrastructure that have been identified as surplus by the NHS. We compare the homes planned on these sites to the average wages of NHS key workers.

View map of NHS land sales

By failing to use the land to meet the vast and growing unmet need for decent, affordable homes the Government is dramatically failing in its mission to ​“fix our broken housing market”. Public land could be the key to solving the housing crisis, but instead is being used for more unaffordable homes, and generating record profits and bonuses for the big developers.

Key findings

• Of the homes to be built for sale on NHS land, four out of five will be unaffordable to a nurse on an average salary. And where they could afford the mortgage repayments, a nurse would have to save for an average of 53 years to afford the deposit.
• Only one in 10 of the homes built on sold-off NHS land will be for genuinely affordable social rent. (There are 1.2 million English households on the waiting list for social housing.)
• The average expected sale price for these new homes, based on area estimates, is £315,279. This is 10 times the annual salary of a nurse.
• In London, the average expected sale price is £561,589 – 18 times the annual salary of a nurse.
• In London, across all sites, no homes for sale will be affordable to NHS key workers, including nurses and midwives. And even if they could afford the repayments, the shortest time it would take an NHS key worker to save for a deposit in the capital is 117 years.