Making the most of Labour’s inheritance

Originally written as a column for Inside Housing

The economic inheritance of the next government will be so dire that it’s hard to avoid thinking that the prospects for housing investment will be even worse.

Take an already inadequate Affordable Homes Programme, add higher costs for construction, building safety, decarbonisation and follow the freeze on capital investment implied in current spending plans and you seem to have a recipe for housing disaster.

However, an important chapter in the latest UK Housing Review challenges that view on two important levels.

Glen Bramley builds on his longstanding work on housing need by essentially looking through the other end of the telescope at different scenarios for total completions of new homes in 2031 (ie after market conditions have recovered from the cost of living crisis etc).

His ‘low’ scenario corresponds with actual performance recently while ‘very low’ takes account of the current economic climate and recent changes in government planning policy that will reduce supply still further.

As the graph shows, under the ‘low’ scenario, there would be just 211,000 completions per year by 2031, with around 66,000 affordable homes including 35,000 for social rent. ‘Very low’ cuts those numbers by more than 20 per cent to just 164,000 overall and 50,000 affordable including 24,000 for social rent.

Judged against those numbers, the other three scenarios look a long way off, especially the promised land of ‘High-medium’ and ‘High’, which correspond with Labour’s pledge of 1.5 million new homes over five years and longstanding calls for 90,000 social rent homes a year.