Ely’s Housing Shortage: Causes, Impact, and Solutions

Ely is a cathedral city located in Cambridgeshire, England, situated approximately 14 miles north of Cambridge. It sits within the East Cambridgeshire District and is governed by East Cambridgeshire District Council (ECDC). The city has a population of approximately 20,000 residents and is known for its Norman cathedral, agricultural heritage, and position along the River Great Ouse. Despite its modest size, Ely has become a focal point for one of the most pressing local issues in the East of England: a sustained and worsening housing shortage that affects affordability, local services, and community stability.

What Is Causing Ely’s Housing Shortage?

Ely’s housing shortage is driven by a combination of constrained land supply, rapid population growth, high demand from Cambridge commuters, and slow planning approvals. These four factors have collectively reduced the availability of affordable and market-rate homes for existing and incoming residents.

The primary driver of Ely’s housing shortage is its geographic and economic proximity to Cambridge. Cambridge is one of the fastest-growing economic hubs in the United Kingdom, home to major employers in biotechnology, technology, and education, including the University of Cambridge and Cambridge Biomedical Campus. Workers employed in Cambridge increasingly settle in Ely due to lower property prices, direct rail access via the Ely to Cambridge line, and a comparatively quieter lifestyle. This outward migration of demand from Cambridge into Ely inflates property values and rental costs without a corresponding increase in housing supply.

Land constraints compound the problem significantly. Ely is partially surrounded by the Fenland landscape, a low-lying, flat terrain that presents engineering and flood risk challenges for large-scale residential development. Portions of land adjacent to the city are classified within flood risk zones, limiting where new builds can be legally and safely constructed. The Environment Agency designations, alongside Green Belt and agricultural land protections, reduce the total developable area within reasonable distance of the city centre.

Planning delays have historically slowed the delivery of new housing. East Cambridgeshire District Council has faced government scrutiny over the pace of housing delivery. In 2023, the Council was placed on the Housing Delivery Test monitoring list after delivering fewer homes than the government’s annual target. Under the Housing Delivery Test, introduced by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, local authorities that fall below 95 percent of their housing delivery requirement face requirements to increase their housing land supply buffer, typically from a 5-year supply to a 20 percent additional buffer.

How Has Ely’s Housing Shortage Developed Over Time?

Ely’s housing shortage intensified significantly between 2010 and 2024, coinciding with the expansion of Cambridge’s knowledge economy, increased national demand for rural and semi-rural properties, and the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on housing preferences. The shortage is not a recent phenomenon but rather the accumulation of decades of under-delivery.

Before 2010, Ely experienced moderate population growth and relatively stable house prices. The city’s property market was considered affordable by regional standards. House prices in Ely averaged around 220,000 British pounds in the early 2010s, broadly consistent with the East Cambridgeshire average. By 2022, average house prices in Ely had risen to approximately 380,000 British pounds, representing a 72 percent increase over a decade, according to HM Land Registry data. This increase substantially outpaced wage growth in the district during the same period.

The pandemic years of 2020 to 2022 accelerated the shortage. Remote working policies enabled Cambridge professionals to relocate further from their offices, with many choosing Ely for its connectivity and open space. This surge in demand from relatively high-income buyers squeezed first-time buyers and lower-income residents out of the market. Private rental prices in Ely rose by over 30 percent between 2020 and 2023, according to figures published by the Office for National Statistics in its annual rental market data series.

East Cambridgeshire District Council adopted a Local Plan in 2015, updated in subsequent years, that allocated specific sites for residential development within Ely. However, site delivery has been inconsistent. Several allocated sites experienced extended delays due to infrastructure requirements, legal disputes over Section 106 agreements, and viability assessments that led developers to reduce or remove affordable housing contributions from proposed schemes.

What Are the Effects of Ely’s Housing Shortage on Residents?

Ely’s housing shortage has produced three primary effects on residents: reduced housing affordability, increased pressure on social housing waiting lists, and displacement of lower-income households from the city. Each effect carries measurable social and economic consequences.

Housing affordability in Ely has deteriorated to the point where the average house price-to-earnings ratio exceeds 10:1 in some areas of the city. The UK Government’s standard affordability threshold identifies 4:1 as the boundary beyond which homeownership becomes difficult without significant external financial support. At current price levels, a median-earning household in Ely earning approximately 33,000 British pounds annually would require a deposit of more than 75,000 British pounds to secure a mortgage on a median-priced property under conventional lending conditions.

Social housing provision has not kept pace with demand. Cambridgeshire County Council maintains a housing register from which eligible applicants are allocated social rented properties. In East Cambridgeshire, the waiting list for social housing extended to over 2,000 active applicants as of 2023, with average waiting times for a two-bedroom property exceeding three years. Families classified in Band C priority, which includes those in overcrowded or unsuitable accommodation, frequently wait longer than the national average for social housing allocations.

Displacement is occurring among lower-income workers who are essential to local services. Hospital workers employed at Ely’s Princess of Wales Hospital, school staff, retail employees, and agricultural workers increasingly report being unable to afford accommodation in the city. This displacement forces employees to commute longer distances, increases transport costs, and in some cases leads to workforce shortages in key public services. The National Health Service in Cambridgeshire has cited housing costs as a factor in recruitment difficulties for community-based roles.

What Housing Developments Are Planned for Ely?

East Cambridgeshire District Council has approved and allocated several residential development sites in Ely to address the housing shortage, with a combined target of delivering over 3,000 new homes within the city and its immediate surroundings by 2031.

The largest planned development is the Ely North site, which forms part of the emerging Local Plan and has been identified as a strategic allocation for approximately 3,000 homes. Ely North represents a major urban extension north of the existing city boundary. The site requires significant infrastructure investment, including a new primary school, road improvements at key junctions, connections to existing cycling and pedestrian networks, and upgrades to wastewater treatment capacity managed by Anglian Water. Development on the Ely North allocation is subject to a masterplan process, and as of 2024 the site has moved through early-stage planning consultation phases.

Additional smaller site allocations have been granted planning permission across Ely, including sites on Downham Road, the former Ely College recreation ground, and areas adjacent to the Ely bypass. These sites are at varying stages of construction. Housebuilders including Persimmon, Taylor Wimpey, and Bellway have been active in delivering homes within East Cambridgeshire.

Affordable housing is a mandated component of major new developments under national planning policy. Section 106 agreements require developers to provide a percentage of affordable units in new schemes, typically set at 40 percent for major developments by ECDC. However, developers routinely submit viability assessments arguing that site-specific costs reduce their capacity to deliver the required affordable proportion, resulting in negotiated reductions. This practice is widely criticised by housing campaign groups including Shelter and the National Housing Federation as a systemic barrier to increasing affordable housing supply.

How Does Ely’s Housing Shortage Compare to the Wider Cambridgeshire Region?

Ely’s housing shortage is part of a broader regional crisis that affects the entirety of Cambridgeshire and the wider Arc, the government’s designated economic corridor stretching from Oxford to Cambridge. The Oxford to Cambridge Arc is a planning framework supported by the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government designed to deliver up to one million new homes across the corridor by 2050.

Across Cambridgeshire, South Cambridgeshire District Council, Cambridge City Council, Huntingdonshire District Council, and Fenland District Council all face housing delivery challenges at varying scales. Cambridge City itself has near-exhausted its developable land within city boundaries, with the Cambridge Local Plan directing growth outward to market towns and villages, including Ely. This spatial planning strategy formally places a portion of Cambridge’s unmet housing need onto East Cambridgeshire, increasing the pressure on Ely specifically.

The Cambridgeshire and Peterborough Combined Authority, established in 2017 under the Cities and Local Government Devolution Act 2016, has a strategic housing mandate. The Combined Authority produces regional housing strategies and distributes investment from Homes England, the government’s housing delivery agency, to local authorities. Homes England funding programmes including the Affordable Homes Programme allocate grant money to registered providers to deliver affordable and social rented housing within the region, with Ely included as a priority area given documented housing need.

What Solutions Are Being Proposed to Address Ely’s Housing Shortage?

Solutions being proposed and implemented to address Ely’s housing shortage include accelerating the delivery of the Ely North strategic allocation, increasing the capacity of Anglian Water’s treatment infrastructure, reforming the viability assessment process, expanding the role of registered providers in delivering affordable housing, and improving transport infrastructure to manage growth sustainably.

Infrastructure investment is critical to unlocking housing delivery in Ely. Anglian Water has identified Ely’s wastewater treatment works as a constraint on housing growth. Without expansion of treatment capacity, new developments cannot connect to the sewerage network, creating a physical barrier to construction. Anglian Water has committed to upgrading the facility, with works expected to complete in phases between 2025 and 2028 as part of its Asset Management Plan, a five-year regulatory investment programme overseen by Ofwat, the water industry regulator.

Transport improvements are also central to the housing strategy. Network Rail and the Department for Transport have discussed upgrades to the Ely rail junction, which is a critical bottleneck on the national rail network. Improvements to Ely junction would increase train frequency and capacity on routes connecting Ely to Cambridge, Peterborough, Norwich, and London Liverpool Street, making the city more accessible for a larger resident population. Greater frequency of rail services is considered a prerequisite for sustainable population growth in the city.

Community Land Trusts represent an emerging model being explored within Cambridgeshire to deliver permanently affordable housing. A Community Land Trust is a not-for-profit organisation that owns land on behalf of a community and uses it to provide homes at below-market prices in perpetuity. This model removes speculative profit from land transactions and ensures that affordability is maintained across successive ownership transfers. No Community Land Trust has yet been formally established in Ely, but advocacy groups within East Cambridgeshire have called for ECDC to facilitate their formation as part of the Ely North masterplan process.

Why Does Ely’s Housing Shortage Matter Beyond the City?

Ely’s housing shortage matters beyond the city because it reflects systemic failures in English planning, land supply management, and affordable housing delivery that are replicated across hundreds of market towns in England. The resolution of Ely’s housing crisis has implications for national housing policy, regional economic productivity, and the future of smaller cities as sustainable places to live.

The productivity of the Cambridge economy is directly constrained when workers cannot afford to live within a reasonable distance of their place of employment. Research published by the Centre for Cities, a non-partisan urban policy think tank, identifies housing affordability as a primary limiter of labour market efficiency in high-productivity city-regions. When Ely fails to deliver sufficient housing, it limits the pool of workers available to Cambridge’s knowledge economy and drives up wages in ways that increase costs for businesses and public services alike.

For national housing policy, Ely serves as a case study in the tension between local planning constraints and national housing delivery targets. The Government’s housing target of 370,000 new homes per year in England, set as part of the National Planning Policy Framework revision in 2023, requires market towns like Ely to absorb substantial growth. Whether Ely’s planning system, infrastructure capacity, and community engagement processes can deliver at the required pace is a question with implications for towns across the country facing similar pressures.