What housing policy has aimed to do
Successive governments have promised to build more homes, improve affordability, help first-time buyers, protect renters, and regenerate deprived areas. The headline target of 300,000 new homes per year has been repeated by multiple Prime Ministers.
It has most clearly failed. The 300,000 per year target has never been met. England typically builds 200,000-230,000 homes annually. The shortfall has compounded over decades, with estimates of an accumulated deficit of over a million homes.
House prices relative to earnings are near historic highs. The average home now costs around 8-9 times average earnings nationally, and far more in London and the South East. Homeownership among younger people has collapsed compared to previous generations.
Despite repeated reform attempts in 2011, 2021 and 2023, the planning system remains slow, adversarial, and heavily weighted toward existing owners. Local opposition (NIMBYism) has been politically accommodated rather than overridden.
Right to Buy has changed about 2 million social homes into owner-occupied ones since 1980, and replacement building has been negligible by comparison. The social housing waiting list in England stands at over 1.3 million households.
Both homelessness and rough sleeping have risen significantly since 2010, with temporary accommodation costs to local authorities now running at crisis levels.
The post-Grenfell cladding crisis left hundreds of thousands of flat owners trapped in unsellable, uninsurable properties. Resolution has been painfully slow. Leasehold reform has been promised for years with limited delivery.
Several structural factors explain the failure.
Existing homeowners, who vote in large numbers, benefit from high prices. Politicians have rarely been willing to accept the political cost of genuinely fixing supply.
There is fragmented responsibility because housing sits across local planning authorities, central government, developers, and housing associations, with misaligned incentives throughout.
Some have blamed developers. The major housebuilders have been accused of ‘land banking, sitting on permissions rather than building, though evidence of this is debated.
The sacred-cow status of the Green Belt has constrained building in precisely the high-demand areas where it is most needed.
Short-termism has been a factor because policy has lurched between approaches with each new Housing Secretary (there have been over a dozen since 2010).
Housing is arguably the area of greatest domestic policy failure in the UK over the past 30 years. The consequences have included a generation locked out of ownership, overcrowded renting, rising homelessness, and an economy distorted by property costs. These are severe and worsening.
Housing has failed on nearly every metric that matters to ordinary people. There is now broader cross-party acknowledgement of this, which may signal change, but this has yet to impact on delivery.
Madsen Pirie