A Designated Protected Area (DPA) is a mostly-rural area where Shared Ownership homes carry extra protections so they stay affordable for local people. If a home is in one, it can change whether you can ever own it outright and how you can sell it. This is the plain-English guide to what they are and why they matter.
DPAs are defined in law by the Housing (Right to Enfranchisement) (Designated Protected Areas) (England) Order 2009 (SI 2009/2098). That order lists the specific parishes and areas that are designated.
A companion set of regulations — the Housing (Shared Ownership Leases) (Exclusion from Leasehold Reform Act 1967) (England) Regulations 2009 (SI 2009/2097) — is what actually allows the staircasing restriction and excludes these homes from the right to buy the freehold (enfranchise) under the Leasehold Reform Act 1967.
Homes England's guidance describes DPAs as "settlements also currently designated as being exempt from the Right to Acquire (with a population of less than 3,000)" — so they are typically small, rural villages and parishes. The same areas are generally excluded from the Right to Acquire for the same reason.
The purpose is to keep homes affordable for local people in hard-to-replace rural areas. In a small village, once a home is sold at full market value it is very hard to replace with another affordable one, so the rules keep it within reach of local buyers for the long term.
In a DPA, the Shared Ownership lease must do one of two things (Capital Funding Guide):
There can also be resale conditions such as a local-connection requirement. See Shared Ownership staircasing and the 80% cap and selling a Shared Ownership home for the detail.
Some parishes are designated in full; others are designated only "by maps", meaning only part of the parish — typically the rural area, excluding the built-up settlement — is in the DPA. For those, the official Homes England boundary map decides whether a specific plot is inside the protected area; the parish name alone can't tell you.
You can get an indicative answer in seconds: check an address or postcode on DPA Check. It matches the location against the SI 2009/2098 schedules and, for "by maps" parishes, links the official Homes England map so you can confirm the exact boundary.
This is indicative guidance, not legal advice — always confirm against the official map and your lease, and take professional advice before relying on a result.
Accurate as of June 2026.
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