Under starter’s orders

Posted: January 19, 2026 | Author: julesbirch | Filed under: Housebuilding | Tags: Robert Jenrick, Steve Reed |Leave a comment

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing.

With neat synergy, the housing secretary and one of his more notable predecessors are both boasting about their record using perhaps the most inaccurate housing statistic out there.

First Steve Reed threw his ‘build baby build’ cap into the air at the news of an increase in housing starts. 

‘Thanks to our changes to planning laws we’re now seeing the green shoots of recovery,’ he said, ‘with an 18 per cent increase in work starting on new homes compared to the previous year.’

Then Robert Jenrick, the Conservative defector to Reform, took time out from making other political news to boast about his record six years (and six housing secretaries) ago. 

‘When I was housing secretary, I felt passionately that we should get young people on to the housing ladder,’ he told the BBC’s Laura Kuenssberg in an interview following his defection to Reform. ‘What did I do? I got housing starts in this country to the highest level in my lifetime. Way, way, way above what you see today under Steve Reed or Angela Rayner.’

Both boasts have a grain of truth in them – but both need to be accompanied by more than a few pinches of salt.

Reed is correct that housing starts have risen by 18 per cent if you compare the last four quarters to the previous four.

However, those previous four included the end of 2023, when the disastrous Truss-Kwarteng budget sparked a surge in interest rates and a slump in demand. In the fourth quarter of 2023 there were just 17,000 starts, the second lowest total in almost 50 years. 

Starts have bounced back since Labour came to power and immediately signalled its support for housebuilding and planning reform but an average of fewer than 30,000 per quarter is nothing to shout about. 

While starts may be an early indicator of progress, you can’t live in a start: if Reed had looked at completions over the last year he would have had to report a 10 per cent fall on a year earlier. 

Jenrick’s claim requires more salt and also owes much to a recovery from a slump in activity, this time from Covid.

His spell as housing secretary between July 2019 and September 2021 will probably be remembered for his unlawful approval of a housing development proposed by a Conservative donor but he did at least attempt to reform planning more generally before being blocked by Downing Street. 

Housing starts did rise in that period, reaching 175,000 in 2021/22 as they recovered from the pandemic.

However, that boast about ‘the highest level in my lifetime’ does not stand up to scrutiny: since Jenrick was born in January 1982, there have been six years with higher starts and three in which they’ve exceeded 200,000. 

So even in their own terms there is shaky evidence to back up the two housing secretaries’ claims. 

What dumps a whole barrel of salt on them is the way that both used starts as the basis for them.

It’s long been known that the housebuilding starts and completions statistics significantly under-estimate delivery of new homes. That’s partly because they do not include homes created via conversions and change of use (or allow for demolitions) but mostly because they are based on building control returns.

Thanks to the privatisation of building control in the 1980s and uncertainties over data collection, the starts and completions statistics have become more and more inaccurate over time.

That’s why the government’s preferred measure, and the basis of the 1.5 million new homes target, is net additional dwellings. 

The gap between the two has been growing over time: since 2001/02 there have been 3.5 million starts and completions but 4.6 million net additional homes. 

On this basis, Jenrick’s first year in office 2019/20 saw record net additions of 249,000 but he can hardly claim credit for that. Net additions fell to 218,000 in the pandemic year of 2020/21 and recovered to 234,000 in 2021/22.

By contrast 2024/25 saw 209,000 net additions,  most of them under Labour but the product of decisions made  under the Tories given time lags in construction. 

Statistics on housing supply now include more up-to-date estimates, enabling Reed to boast that 309,600 new homes were delivered between the start of this parliament in July 2024 and January 11 this year. His department says this means that ‘the government has now surpassed a fifth of its 1.5 million homes target’.

What it did not add was that this was achieved in 18 months rather than 12: 309,600 leaves 1.19 million to be delivered in the next three and a half years, or 340,000 a year.

Targets can concentrate minds and influence priorities in government but it is still hard to find anyone apart from Steve Reed who believes that it is possible to meet this one.

And, even if it could be achieved, 1.5 million homes will not make homes much more affordable on their own. The point is to get a sustained increase over a long period. 

Success for this government should instead be judged more in terms of the system it puts in place to deliver for the long term, and here it has a good story to tell in terms of planning reform, new legislation and work to establish a new generation of new towns.

But with politics as febrile as it currently is, will Steve Reed and the Labour government even make it to the long term?

And, even if Robert Jenrick still believes in the case for more homes, will he be able to shake Reform’s core belief that the solution to the housing problem is simply to cut immigration?

Both housing secretaries made a start. Will either of them finish the job?

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