You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
Latest housing research: is the 1.5 million homes target ambitious enough, and what will it take to achieve?
New reports calculate just how many homes the UK needs, but we must recognise the scale of the challenge, writes Anna Clarke, director of policy and public affairs at The Housing Forum, and member of the Thinkhouse Editorial Panel
New reports calculate how many homes the UK needs, but we must recognise the scale of the challenge, writes Anna Clarke, director of policy and public affairs at The Housing Forum #UKhousingThe government’s target of 1.5 million new homes has certainly captured headlines. Several report submissions to the Thinkhouse library picked up on this topic, asking whether it is ambitious enough and if it can be delivered.
First up, Ben Hopkinson, head of housing and infrastructure at the Centre for Policy Studies, has analysed data to ask How Many Homes Does the UK Need? He draws on international figures on costs, homes per capita and housing space per person. The report highlights that the UK is not unusual in having a growing population, but it has failed to deliver the rate of housebuilding that other countries have to accommodate people.
Read more
‘Missing’ homes in the UK
This leads to the conclusion that the UK is “missing” 6.5 million homes, which is significantly higher than previous analysis of 4.3 million homes. Mr Hopkinson uses the example of France, which over the past four decades has expanded its housing stock by around 1.1% a year, compared with the 0.8% average per year of the UK. He writes: “This seemingly small difference, of just 0.3%, compounds aggressively over the years.”
The report then calculates that if we were to build new homes at a rate of 380,000 a year (which is roughly the government’s ambition, scaled to the whole of the UK) and have zero net migration, it would take until 2040
to eliminate the shortfall.
More realistically, if we build at the rate we have done over the past decade (255,000 homes per year), alongside predicted rates of immigration, it would take 90 years to reach the European weighted average of 542 homes per 1,000 people. It is all fairly broad-brush analysis, but does give a sense that the government’s ambition is not overly ambitious if you look purely in terms of what is needed.
However, the government’s target certainly does seem ambitious if you focus on the other side of the coin and how it can be delivered – and this is the theme of two other reports.
Ben Cooper is research manager and head of the Fabian Housing Centre at the Fabian Society. His Breaking Ground: Delivering 1.5m homes in one parliament report starts by noting that the target is higher than we have achieved per year for more than half a century. He focuses particularly on the collapse in new homes built by housing associations and councils – down from 121,000 a year in the 1970s to just 31,000 a year in the past 10 years, leaving a sizable shortfall.
In the five years preceding the 2024 general election, just 764,000 homes were started across England, Mr Cooper says. This means that to deliver 1.5 million new housing starts between 2024 and 2029, the rate of new home starts would have to almost double.
The report says: “Despite Labour’s dire inheritance, building 1.5 million new homes is possible. However, the government will need to go beyond reforming planning and investing in social housing. These policies will make a significant difference to the pace of housebuilding, but they will not be enough on their own.”
Achievements so far and what else is needed
Our own Housing Forum’s Roadmap to 1.5m homes: One year in report analyses what the government has done over the first 12 months and what there is still to do. The list of achievements looks impressive, reflecting a strong sense across the sector that the government has been listening and acting on most of the big asks to unlock new homes. Achievements include boosted and longer-term funding for affordable housing, planning reform, a 10-year social rent settlement and mechanisms to reduce borrowing costs.
Both the Housing Forum and Fabian Society’s reports focus in on what else is needed to deliver. The Fabian Society focuses particularly on the need for greater funding for social housing, construction skills, widening the array of house builders, including SMEs, and improving transport infrastructure to unlock additional housing development.
The Housing Forum’s roadmap also highlights the need to address the skills shortage. But it also identifies the urgent need to unblock sites that are stalled due to delays with the Building Safety Regulator as a key action for the next 12 months.
Looking to later on in the parliament, the report identifies the need to ensure that housing delivery can continue throughout a period of local government reorganisation, which clearly poses a risk to maintaining the upward trajectory needed to achieve the target.
Both reports recognise the dire situation that the housing sector was in at the start of the current parliament and the scale of the challenge needed to turn this around. They also draw similar conclusions around the number of new homes we would need to be building by the fifth year, to compensate for lower delivery in the first years of the new parliament (435,000 from the Fabian Society and 450,000 from The Housing Forum).
Both, however, do conclude that the target is possible – with the right will and set of policies in place.
Anna Clarke, director of policy and public affairs, The Housing Forum, and member, Thinkhouse Editorial Panel
Related stories
