Angela's Gnashes
It’s possible that Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner has a super power.
Stupidity.
That would explain why she remains so seemingly confident that she can achieve her target of overseeing the building of 1.5m new houses by 2029.
It is a key Labour pledge made when they got elected.
To achieve this over the five-year period, they would need to build +300,000 new homes per year – considerably more than the 200,000 achieved last year by the Conservative government. However, due to the “urgent” housing crisis facing the UK, Deputy PM and Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, Angela Rayner, has stated that the new Labour housing target is now 370,000 homes per year.
OK, so Angela is now 10 months into the first year of this massive housing commitment and it seems reasonable to check in to see how much progress has been made. Right?
“Since the Labour government took office in July 2024, approximately 160,000 to 170,000 new homes have been built in the UK. This estimate is based on Energy Performance Certificate (EPC) records and Office for National Statistics (ONS) data, which indicate about 107,000 completions from July to December 2024, with projections of 50,000 to 60,000 additional completions in 2025”
How does this compare with the previous Conservatives Government?
These figures reflect a 10% year-on-year decline in housebuilding, with every region in England seeing a reduction.
LOL - that’s the Rayner factor in action! We are building fewer houses.
Now we know that the official "net additional dwellings" statistics, which provide a more complete measure of housing stock changes, won’t be available for Labour’s first year until November 2025 but at this point Labour is massively behind its target and in order to now get to the 1.5m by end 2029, it will now need to build record numbers of houses EVERY YEAR between 2026 and 2029.
To put that in perspective, the highest number of houses build in any year since the Millennium has been 241,000 in 2018-2019. This was England’s highest since 1991 BUT included 29,260 change-of-use homes. The net new build was circa 210,000 houses,
It seems impossible that Labour will get anywhere NEAR their 1.5 million house target and as we have seen it’s entirely possible that we will end up with fewer houses than the Conservatives built over the same period.
I suspect by that time Rayner will have constructed plausible deniability to prove it wasn’t her fault.
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Wether houses etc get built in ANY locality should ONLY be taken by LOCAL people not the centralised dictatorial government.
If Labour haven’t already passed legislation fast tracking planning permission the green belt for hundreds of thousands of high density Barrett’s style shoes boxes then they’re already well
On the back foot with this promise. Back in 2014 — and this was based on 2014 population figures and stats — the National association of house builders estimated there was a backlog of 1.4m dwellings. So even if No Brainer and Co. managed to start the construction of 2m dwellings in 5 years they wouldn’t even touch the sides of the problem. In fact they’ll probably import enough people during their 5 year term to offset the benefit of any homes they build, regardless of how many they build. Who’d have guessed importing millions of people who needs homes would cause a housing crisis?