Warrington's housing needs survey closes on Friday 21 August, and anyone living in the borough can fill it in, not only the 15,000 households sent a form.

The survey that will shape what gets built in Warrington, and who it gets built for, closes at the end of this week. Warrington Borough Council’s Housing Needs Survey 2026 shuts on Friday 21 August, and the part most residents will not know is that it is open to everyone living in the borough, not just to the roughly 15,000 households that were posted a questionnaire. (Warrington Borough Council)

You can complete it online at warringtonhns2026.co.uk, which opens the questionnaire hosted for the council, or by calling 0800 612 9133, where somebody will go through it with you over the phone. The research is being carried out by arc4 Ltd, an independent housing, health and social care consultancy, with arc4 and the council named as joint data controllers on the survey’s own privacy notice.

This is not a general “what do you think of the council” exercise. The council is asking what kinds of homes people need now and expect to need later: to rent and to buy, affordable housing, and specialist accommodation such as accessible and adapted homes.

Why the council has to ask

The immediate driver is a legal duty. The Supported Housing (Regulatory Oversight) Act 2023 requires every council in England to assess supported housing need in its area and publish a Local Supported Housing Strategy and delivery plan. The council says its deadline for that is 31 March 2027. (Warrington Borough Council)

Supported housing means accommodation that comes with care, support or supervision attached: for older people, disabled people, people with mental ill health, young people leaving care, people at risk of homelessness. The council has set out a four-stage method for working out how much of it Warrington needs. It will map what already exists, work out how large the population needing housing with care and support is likely to be, identify what type and level of support that population actually requires, and then estimate the net additional provision needed on top of what is there now.

The second use is planning. The same evidence feeds the council’s Local Housing Needs Assessment, a separate study that underpins the emerging Local Plan, plus future commissioning decisions across housing, health, social care and prevention services.

Cllr John Kerr-Brown, cabinet member for housing services and licensing, said: “Whether you’re looking to buy your first home, rent a property, downsize, or need specialist housing support, we want to hear about your experiences and aspirations.” (Warrington Borough Council)

What comes after Friday

This week’s deadline is the first of several dates that decide what Warrington’s housing looks like for the next decade.

Timeline of Warrington housing and Local Plan dates: the Housing Needs Survey closes 21 August 2026, a Local Plan consultation on vision and spatial strategy is expected in autumn or winter 2026, the Local Supported Housing Strategy is due by 31 March 2027, consultation on the full draft Local Plan is expected in autumn or winter 2027, and key elements of the current Local Plan reach five years old and go out of date in December 2028.
The dates the council has published for the housing survey, the supported housing strategy and the Local Plan update.

The Local Plan update matters more than its dry name suggests. The council’s first, scoping consultation closed in June with over 300 responses from residents, parish councils, community groups, businesses, landowners and developers, alongside a call for sites inviting landowners and developers to put forward land they think could be built on. Two further formal consultations are planned: one anticipated in autumn or winter 2026 on the plan’s vision, aims and spatial strategy, and one expected in autumn or winter 2027 on the full draft before it goes to independent examination. (Warrington Borough Council)

The council is blunt about why it is doing this now. Key elements of the current Local Plan will be out of date in December 2028, when they reach five years old, and the government requires the update to plan for a higher number of homes. If a council has no up-to-date Local Plan, or cannot show a five-year supply of housing land, national planning policy takes precedence, and the council says it then becomes harder to refuse applications “even if they go against local preferences”. That is the practical stake for anyone who has ever objected to a scheme near them: our planning news page tracks what is being decided in the meantime.

The numbers behind the questions

Two sets of published figures show why the council is asking.

On price, HM Land Registry’s UK House Price Index put the average Warrington home at £253,937 in May 2026, up £10,388, or 4.3%, on a year earlier. The first-time buyer average was £211,652. By type it runs from £435,250 for a detached house to £263,634 for a semi, £202,833 for a terrace and £133,474 for a flat. One caveat worth stating plainly, because it is often skipped: UKHPI is a mean average, not a median, so a small number of expensive sales pull it upwards. Our own Warrington house prices page uses the median of completed sales instead, which came out at £250,000 for the year to June 2026, and shows the borough running from £450,000 in Appleton to £140,000 in Fairfield and Howley. (HM Land Registry)

On need, the council’s homelessness team helped 3,496 households between April 2025 and March 2026. In the same year it created 43 new supported accommodation bed spaces for single people, placed 25 households into private rented homes through a new Private Rented Sector Access Scheme, and completed eight moves under a downsizing scheme with eight more in progress and 17 households waiting. It reported six families in bed and breakfast accommodation, none of them beyond the statutory six-week limit. (Warrington Borough Council)

Those are the two ends of the same problem the survey is trying to size: what people can afford to buy or rent, and what happens to the people who cannot.

What it means for you

  • The deadline is Friday 21 August 2026. After that the survey closes and the evidence base is fixed for the strategy and the plan that follow.
  • You do not need a letter to take part. A sample of households was written to, but the survey is open to anyone living in Warrington borough. If you rent, share, live with parents, are on a waiting list or are looking to downsize, none of that disqualifies you, and those are the groups least likely to have been sampled by post.
  • You can do it by phone. Call 0800 612 9133 and arc4 will arrange for someone to complete it with you. That matters for anyone without reliable internet, which is a live issue for exactly the older and disabled residents the supported housing work is about.
  • Answering now is the cheap moment to be heard. Objecting to an individual application later is the expensive one, and by then the plan that allocated the site has usually already been through examination.
  • The results are not just for a report. The council says they will directly inform its Local Supported Housing Strategy and delivery plan, future commissioning and investment across housing, health and social care, and the Local Housing Needs Assessment behind the Local Plan.

We will report the two Local Plan consultations when the council opens them, and the supported housing strategy when it is published. If you have tried to complete the survey and hit a problem, or you are on the housing register and want to tell us what the wait is actually like, write to us at hello@warringtonwire.co.uk.