Spring Statement highlights Autumn to do list
Posted: March 4, 2026 Filed under: Council housing, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Local government, Temporary accommodation Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing
There were by choice no policy announcements in the Spring Statement but the message about the government’s housing priorities could hardly have been clearer.
Chancellor Rachel Reeves had deliberately downplayed the significance of the statement, which was meant to be an update on the public finances rather than a full-blown Budget.
That meant that – with one exception – there were no background documents to wade through to find hidden announcements and hints about future policy direction.]
The exception came from the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR), and the first message was about the key manifesto target of 1.5 additional homes in this parliament.
Not a chance, says the OBR’s Economic and Fiscal Outlook: in the five years from 2025/26 to 2030/31 the independent watchdog forecasts there will be just 1.3 million net additions across the UK (30,000 higher than it forecast in November).
Net additions will fall in line with subdued recent housing starts to just 220,000 in 2026/27, it says, but then rise sharply to just over 305,000 by 2030/31 ‘reflecting the impact of planning reforms’.
That may sound closer than we thought to 1.5 million and the government will welcome the acknowledgement of the impact of its policies.
But eagle-eyed readers will already have spotted that the target is for England whereas the forecast is for the UK and that they cover different time periods.
Adjusting for homes built in Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland only increases the size of the shortfall: England-only net additions will total around 1.1 million, 400,000 short of the target.
Read the rest of this entry »Under starter’s orders
Posted: January 19, 2026 Filed under: Housebuilding | Tags: Robert Jenrick, Steve Reed Leave a commentOriginally 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.
Read the rest of this entry »Budget leaves big gaps to be filled
Posted: November 27, 2025 Filed under: Benefit cap, Budget, Housebuilding, Local housing allowance, Rents Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Even if it had not been leaked in advance, this Budget could have been defined as much by what was not in it as what was.
The astonishing mistake made by the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) in uploading a report containing all the key measures before chancellor Rachel Reeves had started speaking came after weeks of well-sourced stories about them.
We already knew the headline measures: the abolition of the two-child limit; a council tax surcharge on high-value homes; and freezing income tax thresholds.
They were joined on the day by a private landlord tax (higher rates of income tax on income from property), confirmation of more money for the Warm Homes Plan and a welcome move to tackle the ‘benefit trap’ facing tenants in supported and temporary accommodation.
But the Budget delayed one of the decisions most eagerly awaited by social landlords: they will now have to wait until January for the government’s final decision on rent convergence, in effect how quickly they can increase their lowest rents above the CPI plus 1 per cent limit.
Three months on from the consultation closing, the Budget background document explains that: ‘While the government remains committed to implementing social rent convergence, it is important to take the time to get the precise details right, taking account of the benefits to the supply and quality of social and affordable housing, the impact on rent payers and affordability.’
And there was no mention at all of the Local Housing Allowance (LHA) freeze, perhaps the housing issue raised by more organisations than anything else in the run-up to the Budget.
Read the rest of this entry »Cracking the code on Section 106
Posted: October 17, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Section 106 Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
For something so important, the Section 106 system of providing affordable homes seems to exist inside a black box.
We know what goes in (developments all over the country, local councils trying to get the contributions they can) and we know what comes out (almost half of affordable homes delivered for year).
We also know that this is just part of a wider system for capturing land value not just for affordable homes but also community infrastructure and facilities.
But the inner workings of the system seem hidden.
This is most obviously true when it comes to the dark arts of viability assessments that allow experienced developers to run rings around under-resourced local authority planning departments.
But it can also be true in reverse, with the complexity of the system holding development back and sparking calls for reform.
Read the rest of this entry »Missing the target and missing the point
Posted: September 22, 2025 Filed under: Housebuilding Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
A year into the government’s five-year target to build 1.5 million additional homes and signs of progress are thin on the ground.
Indicators of new supply published on Friday estimate that 231,300 net additional homes were delivered in the just over 14 months between the start of the parliament on 9 July 2024 and 14 September 2025.
At this rate, the government will struggle to hit one million additional homes in this parliamentary term, let alone 1.5 million.
Worse still, the supply indicators are currently moving in the wrong direction. In the first quarter of 2025/26 (April to June), building control reported completions were down 5 per cent on a year earlier while the number of energy performance certificates (EPCs) issued for new dwellings was down 14 per cent.
Further back in the pipeline, the number of homes granted planning permission fell 7 per cent in the year to the end of June to 221,000, the fourth annual decline in succession.
The estimates published by the Ministry for Housing Communities and Local Government provide a more accurate picture of new housebuilding than the familiar starts and completions figures and a more timely one than the net additional dwellings statistics that form the basis of the target.
The official figures on net additional dwellings for 2024/25 will not be published until November but MHCLG estimates (based on EPCs for new dwellings but allowing for demolitions) that the annual total will be 199,300. That’s just over 100,000 below the annual rate required to hit the target.
Read the rest of this entry »What’s at stake in the spending review?
Posted: June 3, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Decarbonisation, Help to Buy, Homelessness, Housebuilding, Housing benefit, Rents | Tags: spending review Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
With a week to go until the most consequential spending review for ten years, the Treasury is facing desperate last-ditch lobbying from departments that have yet to agree their settlement.
Last week’s public intervention by chief constables warning that the government will fail to meet its pledges on crime unless they get more cash is sign enough of that.
So too the leaked memo from deputy prime minister Angela Rayner setting out options for higher taxes that was inevitably followed by more leaks about her spending priorities.
As of this week, the Ministry for Housing, Communities and Local Government (MHCLG) was said to be one of the departments yet to agree a settlement, alongside the Home Office, with the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero just finalising one..
By contrast with previous spending reviews, housing starts with the advantage of having a politically powerful secretary of state in charge – and Angela Rayner has repeatedly promised ‘the biggest boost to social and affordable housing in a generation’.
But the ‘biggest boost’ can mean many different things, some of them genuine, some of them not remotely up to the challenge of the moment.
Read the rest of this entry »Spring Statement glow could soon fade
Posted: March 27, 2025 Filed under: Affordable housing, Housebuilding, Welfare reform | Tags: Spring Statement Leave a commentOriginally written as a column for Inside Housing.
Just for a change, housing looks like one of the winners from the Spring Statement – but is everything quite what it seems?
On housebuilding overall, the Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) gave Rachel Reeves a big boost as it delivered a positive verdict on the planning reforms introduced by the government in the Autumn.
The chancellor boasted in her speech that measures such as the new National Planning Policy Framework, the release of ‘grey belt’ land and the restoration of mandatory housing targets would permanently boost GDP by 0.2 per cent by 2029/30 and 0.4 per cent within ten years.
She said: ‘That is the biggest positive growth impact that the OBR have ever reflected in their forecast, for a policy with no fiscal cost.’
Just as good for the chancellor was the watchdog’s forecast on housing numbers: ‘The OBR have concluded that our reforms will lead to housebuilding reaching a 40-year high of 305,000 a year by the end of the forecast period,’ she said. ‘And changes to the National Planning Policy Framework alone will help build over 1.3 million homes in the UK over the next five years, taking us within touching distance of delivering our manifesto promise to build 1.5 million homes in England in this parliament.’
The chancellor phrased that carefully but the Treasury press release was more gung-ho as it boasted that this would be ‘bringing the UK one step closer to its Plan for Change mission to build 1.5 million homes’.
That really would be good news, since almost nobody believes the target can be met, but read that paragraph again and you may spot a problem with it.
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Jules Birch 