The housing access crisis continues to be one of the few issues that garner broad consensus in diagnosing the country’s main problems. The Economic and Social Council (CES) has been analyzing this reality for years and, in its 2025 Report, published this Wednesday, it once again focuses on a phenomenon it considers structural. “High prices […] make access to housing unfeasible for a significant part of the population, hindering youth emancipation and becoming a vector of growing inequality,” warns the body in its latest annual overview. The report also highlights the limited immediate impact that the policies deployed so far are having to address a crisis that continues to show no signs of abating.
The conclusions of the CES — an advisory body to the Government in which unions, employers, and other experts are represented — carry significant weight in the public debate. Although housing is not the main focus of the document published this Wednesday, as it was in the 2024 edition, the report dedicates a specific section to analyzing the market’s evolution in the last fiscal year. In that section, it notes that sales prices continued to rise in 2025 while the number of households increased, a mismatch that supports its main warning: this dynamic is pushing the most vulnerable groups out of the market “despite improvements in employment, average incomes, and favorable credit conditions.”
Despite the technical tone of its assessments, some criticisms of the actions of various administrations in how they address this problem can be inferred from the Council’s text. For example, from the lack of implementation of some measures of the housing law, whose deployment “remains limited,” or the still “small” size of the social and affordable housing stock. However, the CES values the approval of the 2026-2030 State Housing Plan and the launch of the State Housing Entity, Casa 47.
Less energy poverty
As the only positive counterpoint in the housing diagnosis, the report highlights the reduction in the proportion of people affected by energy poverty in 2025, although it warns that the problem still affects 15.9% of the population. The CES trusts that the approval of the second National Energy Poverty Strategy (ENPE 2026‑2030) will “correct the insufficient results obtained” with the previous plan, especially regarding people in residential and energy vulnerability situations.
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The document also values the measures adopted last year in housing to mitigate the effects of the DANA that mainly hit the province of Valencia on October 29, 2024, aimed both at immediate response and at “preventing and combating the impacts of floods associated with climate change.”
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