An eternal optimist, I cheered when Labour, in opposition, U-turned and backed liberalisation of the planning system to allow an increase in the housing supply. The 1.5 million housing target, an annual average of 300,000, would not have been transformational. It would still have left the young (and the not so young) struggling to save for a deposit while also seeing an ever-increasing share of their income taken up in rent and tax. But it would have been an improvement on what had been achieved. In recent years, under the Conservatives, around 200,000 was managed. So a 50% increase would have been better than a poke in the eye with a burnt stick. Perhaps not enough for a sustained fall in house prices but enough to stop them getting even higher in real terms.
Labour’s Manifesto last year declared:
The dream of homeownership is now out of reach for too many young people. The Conservatives have failed to act even though the housing crisis is well known to be one of the country’s biggest barriers to growth. Labour will get Britain building again, creating jobs across England, with 1.5 million new homes over the next parliament.
Three cheers. Much of the so-called ‘green belt’ was really grey and should be built on. Indeed so. But the hitch is that the Government shows no prospect whatsoever of delivering on its rhetoric. The Government is still in denial about its prospects of hitting the 1.5 million housing target. Indeed, as the rhetoric has been ramped up – with the rather embarrassing spectacle of ministers handing out ‘build baby build’ baseball caps – the prospects become ever more remote.
Housing Secretary Steve Reed tells the BBC that he still expected the Government to ‘just meet’ its target by 2029. He points out, quite reasonably, that the target is 1.5 million over five years, not an annual target each year of 300,000. Ministers were ‘pulling every lever’, the Planning and Infrastructure Bill had not yet become law. ‘The big increase to come in the latter part of this parliament’ – the graph would look like ‘a hockey stick’.
It’s right to say the Government will be judged on the five years of building rather than how the figures break down each year. But so far, the figures have been going in the wrong direction.
Meanwhile the English Housing Survey has just been published for the past year, 2024/25, which says the average age of first-time buyers is 34 – compared to 32 five years ago.
It found ‘significant and substantial rises in rent and mortgage payments and a higher proportion of renters saying they struggle to pay for housing’.
For all the extra regulation, the report found the satisfaction with the standard of accommodation in the private rented sector had gone down. Across England, the survey found that ‘the private rented sector contained 518,000 vacant dwellings’ – another discouraging sign of landlords in the process of selling up.
‘The average (mean) rent for households in the private rented sector was £250 per week, almost double the price in the social rented sector, £129 (a difference of £121.24 per week)’, according to the survey. ‘Private rent in London was £393 per week’.
How affordable was this?
On average, mortgagors spent 19% of their household income on mortgage payments, whereas rent payments, with housing support included in income, were 28% for social renters and 34% of household income for private renters. If income from housing support was excluded in the calculation, the average proportion of income spent on rent in 2024-25 was 39% for both private and social renters.
How optimistic are they of becoming homeowners?
Since 2019-20, the proportion of all renters who expected to buy a property has decreased from 45% to 42% in 2024-25. The proportion of social renters expecting to buy decreased from 28% in 2019-20 to 23% in 2024-25 and, in particular, housing association social renters decreased from 29% to 23% over the same time period.
The only surprise is that this worthy ambition has remained as resilient as it has. Increasingly, the grim assumption is that obtaining a sufficient mortgage is unrealistic and the route to home ownership is via the bank of Mum and Dad. They wait longer and have fewer children as a result.
It is no surprise that ‘personal well-being scores varied by tenure’. Owner occupiers reported much higher scores for life satisfaction, thinking life is worthwhile, happiness and lower scores for anxiety than the private rented sector and social rented sector.
Sloganistic baseball caps are not enough to convince these people. Even the dogs in the street know the Government is on course to break its promise. The longer it denies this, the more absurd it looks. Either it should take much stronger action – a big sale of public sector land as well as genuinely radical deregulation – or it should fess up. The home ownership dream is looking more distant than ever under Labour.
According to the Government, England is about to spend £39 billion on social housing. That may be just the start. Andy Burnham, the frontrunner to replace Keir Starmer if he wins this Friday’s Makerfield by-election, has made a large-scale expansion of social housing central to his pitch. Yet the discourse around this number focuses almost […]
This week, Nimby Watch is in Winstanley, in the historical county of Lancashire. But, like certain other people in Winstanley right now, we’ve got our eyes on Westminster… Okay then, why are we in Winstanley. Where exactly is Winstanley, anyway? Well, if you’re part of the southern Westminster elite, you might say that Winstanley is […]
The scale of the housing crisis is sobering. Britain has the worst housing shortage of any major developed nation. Decades of undersupply have contributed to house prices and rents skyrocketing out of reach. In 1997, the average home cost about 3.5 times the average income. As of 2024, an aspiring buyer must devote nearly eight years’ worth of […]
