GBTT Comment · Housing
Labour promised 1.5 million homes. They are on course to deliver just over half. This isn’t a housing target that has been missed — it is one that was never real, and the planning data has been screaming that for three years while ministers talked about reform.
The arithmetic of the target
The pipeline three years out
Comparing against a trough you engineered
The government’s line — that starts rose nearly a quarter on last year — is true and irrelevant. A 12% rise in UK starts off a depressed 2024 base still leaves 2025 starts 21% below pre-pandemic 2019 levels. Comparing against a trough you helped create is not evidence of recovery; it is evidence of how far the market fell.
There is no fiscal room to rescue it
Savills’ own numbers show why this self-corrects slower than ministers assume: unsupported new-build sales have tracked 7–11.5% of total transactions for thirty years without Help to Buy-style demand support. There is currently no fiscal room for a scheme of that size while the public finances remain under this much pressure — so the structural floor under completions stays roughly where it is. The Help to Buy replacement floated by the industry would help, but the government has explicitly declined to fund it, which tells you where this sits in the fiscal pecking order.
A capacity ceiling that sits below the target
There is a second constraint nobody in Whitehall wants to price in: Savills’ own modelling shows the housebuilding sector could reach at most 1.2 million completions over five years even at full capacity. Workforce and supply-chain expansion has a speed limit, and that limit sits below the 1.5 million target regardless of what planning reform delivers. You cannot legislate skilled bricklayers into existence on a Budget timetable.
Land buying is the leading indicator
Berkeley has halted land acquisition entirely. Barratt Redrow has cut its plot approval target from 10,000–12,000 down to 7,000–9,000, citing the post-conflict rate and cost-inflation outlook. Land buying is the leading indicator here, not the lagging one — a housebuilder declining to commit to a site today is a starts number for 2027 and a completions number for 2029. The decisions that decide the back half of this Parliament’s housing record have already been taken, and they were taken cautiously.
Why this matters
Missing a self-set target by something approaching half is a very different story to a modest miss explained by external shocks — and “geopolitical pressures,” doing duty in the department’s own statements, will not cover a gap of this size. Watch the starts-to-completions lag into 2027-28. That is where this year’s depressed pipeline becomes next year’s missed headline number, irrespective of what gets announced at the next Budget.