Breaking Property News 6/1/26
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Why 300,000 new homes a year is a joke – and what needs to change
Labour delivered just 62.2% of its year one target on new homes delivery
When Labour won the 2024 general election, its manifesto committed to delivering 1.5 million new net homes over the following five years, the equivalent of an average of 300,000 homes per year. This pledge remains the government’s headline housing target. However, the latest available building indicators suggest delivery is already falling behind the required pace. Official proxy data drawn from EPC registrations, which are commonly used as an early signal of housing completions, indicates that between July 2024 and mid-June 2025 approximately 186,600 net additional homes were delivered.
That figure is materially below the annualised rate needed to remain on course for the manifesto commitment. Or simply put Labour delivered just 62.2% of its year one target, as well as making the mistake of employing a tax evader as Housing Secretary (who has yet to pay a fine, interest and £40,000 of unpaid SDLT and no doubt in her la-la mindset feels she should now get promotion to PM).
To give political balance, the UK’s chronic undersupply of housing is not a new phenomenon. And the selling off of council or social housing, Margaret Thatcher’s great election winning idea has seen local authorities like Stevanage, who had 40,000 council/social houses dwindle to 8,000 as they were sold off and the cash was not used to build new ones, instead being used for ‘other’ things.
What is new is the renewed political consensus around scale. The ambition to deliver 300,000 homes a year is both necessary and widely supported across the housing, development, and proptech sectors. Yet ambition alone does not build homes, and early delivery data suggests the system is once again struggling to convert political intent into physical output.
It is tempting to frame this shortfall as a political failure, but doing so risks obscuring the deeper issue. The reality is that the UK’s housing delivery system is not structurally configured to operate at this level of sustained output, regardless of which party occupies government. For decades, delivery has plateaued well below the 300,000 mark, even during periods of strong market conditions, lower borrowing costs, and comparatively benign supply chains. Expecting a sudden step-change without fundamental reform is unrealistic.
Interestinglly the tax evader did pledge £10Bn for social housing before she lost her job as Housing Secretary, but this soundbite will be lost as the realisation that there is no cash to carry out this major construction project exists, apart from an episode of ‘Fantasy Island.’
The constraints are well understood across the industry. Planning remains slow, opaque, and inconsistent, with many consented sites taking years to move into construction. Delivery remains heavily concentrated among a small number of volume housebuilders whose commercial incentives prioritise sales absorption and margin protection over speed. Skills shortages in construction continue to cap capacity, while volatility in build costs, finance, and viability negotiations has left many marginal schemes stalled. Overlaying all of this is a profound lack of joined-up data across planning, land, infrastructure, and utilities, which prevents informed decision-making and early intervention when sites begin to drift.
Labour’s early policy signals, including planning reform, the New Homes Accelerator, and renewed interest in large-scale development and new towns, are directionally correct. However, these initiatives have yet to translate into a measurable uplift in delivery. That is not a criticism of intent, but rather a reflection of how deeply embedded the frictions in the system have become.
This is where proptech must move from the periphery to the core of the delivery conversation. Housing at scale is not simply a political challenge; it is a systems-engineering problem. Without digitised, end-to-end planning processes, real-time visibility of stalled sites, and integrated data spanning land, infrastructure, finance, and delivery, output will continue to undershoot ambition. Technology cannot simply make existing processes marginally more efficient; it must enable fundamentally different ways of managing, sequencing, and de-risking development.
There is also a hard mathematical reality that is often overlooked. Delivering an average of 300,000 homes a year across a Parliament requires early momentum. When the first years underperform, later years must significantly overperform to compensate. That compounds pressure on planning departments, construction capacity, and supply chains, increasing the risk that quality, affordability, and placemaking are sacrificed in the rush to close the gap. By the time failure is officially acknowledged, it is frequently already baked into the numbers.
The target itself is not misguided. The UK does need housing at this scale. But unless delivery is treated as an operational challenge rather than a rhetorical one, the risk is that 300,000 homes a year becomes another benchmark that is reaffirmed in speeches while quietly missed in practice.
Solving the housing crisis will not come from slogans, talking shops, whitepapers, countless action groups, it will come from execution at scale, underpinned by technology, data transparency, and delivery models designed for the realities of modern Britain. Until those foundations are in place, the gap between promise and performance is likely to persist — no matter how urgent the need, or how strong the political will.
Which given that by the summer the UK is likely to get a new PM and no doubt a new cabinet including another new Housing Secretary, means the chances of 1.5M new homes being provided by this Labour government in 60 months will fall even lower than its present 62.2% ‘poor could do better’ rating.
Andrew Stanton Executive Editor – moving property and proptech forward. PropTech-X
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