Warsash Affordable Homes Dropped for £452,285 Payment

All five affordable homes are set to come out of a 14-home development in Warsash, because no housing association would buy them. Instead the developer would pay Fareham Borough Council £452,285 to build affordable housing somewhere else in the borough.

Fareham’s Planning Committee decides on Wednesday 9 September whether to accept the swap. Officers recommend that it does.

The reason given in the officer’s report is not viability in the usual sense. The developer says it tried and could not find a buyer.

What was agreed, and what is now proposed

Planning permission for 75 Church Road, Warsash was granted on 17 November 2025 for 14 homes: nine detached market houses and five affordable ones. A section 106 agreement dated 10 November 2025 locked in the affordable element at not less than 36% of the scheme.

The five affordable homes secured by that agreement are:

• three three-bedroom, six-person homes
• one two-bedroom, four-person home
• one one-bedroom, two-person wheelchair accessible home

The application is reference Q/0559/26, and the applicant and agent are both Imperial Homes. It sits in the Hook-with-Warsash ward.

Worth noting for anyone reading the paperwork: the report describes the same five homes two different ways. The planning permission’s own description lists two three-bed affordable rent homes, one four-bed affordable rent, one two or three-bed shared ownership and one one-bed wheelchair accessible social rent. The section 106 schedule, quoted above, describes them by size and occupancy instead.

Why the developer says it cannot deliver them

The report sets out the developer’s case in some detail, and it is a story about the affordable housing market rather than about this site.

Imperial Homes says it approached a number of Registered Providers, the housing associations and similar bodies that normally buy and manage affordable homes on a private developer’s site. All of them declined.

The explanation the report gives is that Registered Providers are increasingly not taking on small sites at all. According to the report they now typically want a minimum of 30 or more units, and the reasons are:

• reduced grant funding from central government
• increased build cost pressures
• efficiency requirements within Registered Providers
• a focus on large-scale delivery

The developer also listed the homes on the Government’s Social Housing Screening Platform, set up by Homes England precisely to match up unwanted affordable units. No Registered Provider expressed interest and no bids were received.

The only interest at all came from two Registered Providers, and only on a shared equity basis rather than for social rent. The council’s Housing Development Officer would not accept that.

“Fareham has not previously been affected”

The most significant line in the report is not about this development. It is the council’s Housing Development Officer describing what is happening across the county:

Securing a Housing Provider for smaller sites has been an ongoing issue for several Hampshire authorities for some time. While Fareham has not previously been affected, it appears that we may now be beginning to experience similar challenges.

The officer adds that delivering the homes as shared equity “would not meet the council’s identified housing need in Fareham”, and that a commuted sum is the better of the two options on the table. They also note that Warsash is “a lower housing need area for those on the Council’s housing register”, which is why this site is a comparatively soft place for the problem to land first.

How the £452,285 was arrived at

The original scheme did not quite hit the borough’s own policy. Policy HP5 of the Fareham Local Plan 2037 requires 40% affordable housing, and 36% was accepted at the time because the applicant had offered the one-bedroom wheelchair accessible unit for social rent at the pre-application stage, meeting an identified local need.

That concession disappears if the homes are not built. So the report says the off-site payment must reflect the full 40%, not the 36% that was secured.

The contribution is £452,285, payable in three instalments: before the first plot is occupied, before the seventh, and before the thirteenth. The final plot cannot be occupied until the whole sum has been paid.

Forty per cent of 14 homes is 5.6 homes, so on our own arithmetic the payment works out at roughly £80,800 per home that the policy would have required on site. The report does not express it that way, and it does not say how the total is split between the three payments.

Where the money would go

The report is specific about this. Fareham Housing, the council’s own house-building arm, has an active development programme with two schemes at planning application stage, including 130 to 136 West Street, Fareham, the former Birks of Fareham site.

Funding for those projects goes to the council’s Executive when approval is needed, with final authorisation by the Section 151 Officer, the statutory finance officer.

The wider number

Fareham cannot currently demonstrate the five-year housing land supply that national policy requires. The council’s own Five Year Housing Land Supply Statement, measured at 1 April 2026, puts the borough at 2.99 years.

The arithmetic behind that figure is stark. The requirement for the five years to March 2031 is 5,140 homes, including 1,018 homes of under-delivery carried forward and a 20% buffer applied because delivery over the previous three years fell below 85% of the requirement. Expected supply is 3,072 homes. That is a shortfall of 2,068.

Five homes is a small number against 2,068. What the report describes is not.

What it means for you

• If you live near 75 Church Road, the number of homes on the site does not change. Fourteen are still proposed. What changes is that none of them would be affordable.
• If you are on the council’s housing register, the £452,285 is meant to buy affordable homes elsewhere in the borough rather than in Warsash, and the report points at Fareham Housing’s own schemes as the likely destination.
• If you want to have your say, the committee meets at 2pm on Wednesday 9 September in the Collingwood Room at the Civic Offices, and the meeting is open to the public. Item 5 on the agenda is deputations, “of which notice has been lodged”, so notice has to be given in advance.
• A word of warning on that. The link the council’s own agenda gives for its deputation rules returns a 404, and deputations are not listed on the council’s Have Your Say index either. Contact Democratic Services through the agenda page rather than hunting for the guidance.
• If this matters to you beyond one site, the council is consulting on its new Local Plan to 2044 until 2 October, and how much affordable housing it asks for, and on what size of site, is exactly the kind of thing that gets settled there.

Officers recommend that members delegate authority to the Head of Planning, in consultation with the Solicitor to the Council, to complete the deed of variation. That is a recommendation, not a decision. The committee can refuse it.

More from Fareham News: planning news, house prices, council tax bands and roadworks and travel.

Sources

• Officer report on Q/0559/26, 75 Church Road, Warsash, to Fareham Borough Council’s Planning Committee on 9 September 2026, for the permission date, the section 106 terms, the developer’s evidence, the Housing Development Officer’s comments, the £452,285 figure, the payment triggers and the recommendation.
• Planning Committee agenda, Wednesday 9 September 2026, for the meeting time, venue and the deputations item.
• Five Year Housing Land Supply Statement, Fareham Borough Council, position as at 1 April 2026, for the 2.99 years figure and the requirement and supply totals behind it.