Waverley has taken on three affordable homes at Oakland Grove in Chiddingfold. Its housing register held 751 households, 70 of them needing three bedrooms.
Three new affordable homes at Oakland Grove in Chiddingfold have been handed to Waverley Borough Council, which announced on 13 August that both rented properties are already let and the third is being sold as shared ownership. (Waverley Borough Council, 13 August 2026)
The homes are two three-bedroom semi-detached houses for affordable rent and one two-bedroom semi-detached house for shared ownership. Each has an air source heat pump, an electric vehicle charging point, fitted kitchen appliances and private off-road parking, and the council says the rear gardens back onto open countryside.
The council did not buy them. They came from housebuilder Elivia Homes through a section 106 planning agreement, the mechanism that requires a developer to contribute towards local affordable housing as a condition of planning permission.
Three homes against a register of 751
Waverley’s housing register held 751 households at 31 March 2025, the most recent figure the council has reported to government. Of those, 191 were in a reasonable preference category, the statutory groups councils must prioritise, which includes people who are homeless or living in unsanitary or overcrowded housing. (Local Authority Housing Statistics 2024-25, section C)
The size of home those households need is where the Chiddingfold scheme lands:
- 538 households need one bedroom
- 143 need two bedrooms
- 70 need three bedrooms
- none recorded a need for more than three
So the two three-bedroom rented houses go into the smallest of the three real categories, where 70 households are waiting. The overwhelming demand in Waverley is for one-bedroom homes, and this development does not add any.
How much Waverley adds in a year
Across the whole borough, 241 affordable homes were completed in 2024-25: 79 for social rent, 67 for affordable rent and 95 for shared ownership. Of that total, 147 were recorded as delivered through section 106 agreements, the same route as the Chiddingfold houses. (Live tables on affordable housing supply, MHCLG)
That is the honest scale of it. Section 106 is not a side channel in Waverley, it is how most of the borough’s affordable housing arrives, and it only produces homes when private developers are building. The 241 completed in 2024-25 was double the 120 completed the year before, which is the kind of swing you get when supply depends on other people’s build programmes.
Councillor Janet Crowe, Waverley’s Portfolio Holder for Housing Delivery, said working with developers through planning agreements “is one of the important ways we can secure more affordable homes for local people”. Councillor David Munro, Mayor of Waverley, said he was “particularly pleased that the development includes both affordable rented and shared ownership options”. Richard Morris, Land and Development Director at Elivia Homes, said the firm had been able to “tailor the product to suit Waverley’s requirements”.
What it means for you
If you want to be considered for a home like the two rented houses, you have to be on the housing register first, and the council allocates through Waverley Homechoice. Applications are assessed against Waverley’s own residency and local connection tests, so being on a neighbouring borough’s list does not carry across.
The shared ownership house is a different route entirely. It is bought, not allocated, so it goes through the provider’s sales process rather than the register, and the council says sales activity is already well underway. Anyone interested in that one should not wait for it to appear on the register, because it will not.
Neither route is quick. With 538 households on the register needing a one-bedroom home and a borough-wide delivery figure in the low hundreds a year, the arithmetic is not encouraging for anyone who has just applied.
If you want to see what is being built near you before it reaches this stage, we track Farnham planning news, and our house prices page carries the Land Registry figures for the district.
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