False start

It’s half time for a government that promised to make us ‘a nation of homebuilders’. The crowd are – to put it mildly – not happy.

Figures released yesterday show the performance of the coalition in the first two and a half years of its five-year term. By now its abolition of ‘Stalinist’ top-down regional strategies and creation of the ‘powerful new incentive’ of the new homes bonus and the National Planning Policy Framework should be working.

Instead housebuilding in England is flat-lining at less than half of the level required. The 26,830 housing starts in the fourth quarter of 2012 were up by 180 on the previous three months but down by 400 on a year ago.

Read the rest of this post on Inside Edge, my blog for Inside Housing