Labour has not set a public target for the number of social homes it hopes to deliver, however deputy prime minister Angela Rayner has called for a “council house revolution”.
“Rightly, the government has set a bold housebuilding target,” Andrew Carter, chief executive of Centre for Cities, said.
“For the country to achieve it, parts of England would have to reach an 80-year high in housebuilding. This would be a huge positive for the country but the approach has to be much more ambitious.”
Keep reading the journalism that powers our mission
Register free to continue and learn more about the stories, campaigns and the support we provide, helping people facing poverty across the UK.
He continued: “We’re in a productivity crisis. The UK’s big cities are the jobs and productivity engines of the economy but our planning system doesn’t allow – and has never allowed – them to build an adequate supply of homes for everyone that could work there.”
“By removing the discretionary element of the planning system, the UK would bring its planning system in line with most developed economies, remove a big block on housebuilding and enable places to better respond to future rises in demand for homes,” he said.
“We have done wholesale planning reform before and we can do it again… What we can’t do is raise national economic growth – and reduce the strain high housing costs place on people’s spending power – if we don’t address the backlog of missing homes.”
Addressing the Housing, Communities and Local Government Committee in November, housing minister Matthew Pennycook admitted that Labour’s pledge to build 1.5m homes is “going to be more difficult than what we expected” amid a deepening housing crisis.
He said: “We’re very, very candid about this: we knew that if we won the election we would be grappling with a difficult inheritance in respect of housebuilding as a result of the December 2023 changes to the National Planning Policy Framework, which exacerbated a fall in housing supply that had already been triggered by the present market downturn.”
Pennycook added that the younger generation has been “completely locked out of home ownership as a result of the steadily expanding gap between house prices and average earnings”.
“We’ve got millions of low-to-middle income households forced into insecure unaffordable and far-too-often substandard private rented housing. We have 1.3m people languishing on social housing waiting lists and, to our utter shame as a nation, more than 150,000 homeless children right now living in temporary accommodation.
“That is the price we have paid for not being serious about housebuilding rates.”
Do you have a story to tell or opinions to share about this? Get in touch and tell us more. This Christmas, you can make a lasting change on a vendor’s life. Buy a magazine from your local vendor in the street every week. If you can’t reach them, buy a Vendor Support Kit.
