Half measures

For all the rhetoric from ministers, housebuilding in England is still running at half the level needed to meet demand.

Earlier this week communities secretary Eric Pickles boasted that housebuilding and new supply were ‘on the up’ and that the government had delivered ‘almost a third of a million additional homes in the last two years’.

He quoted NHBC registrations, gross affordable housing supply, net additional dwellings and the number of New Homes Bonus awards to justify that claim. Every housing statistic you can shake a stick at in other words with just one small exception: the housebuilding figures produced by his own department.

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