Starmer Labour claims it will build 300,000 new houses per year and 1.5 million in its first 5 year parliamentary term. Here I look at how likely that is using past house-building data and (darn pesky) fact.
Firstly, the 300k / 1.5 million claim is an intention to build new houses not the increase in overall total housing units available. If 1.5m are built and 1.5m are demolished then there is a zero increase.
- The average number of new homes built by private enterprise in the post war period is 160,000 per year.
- The
last time the SRS total was above the 90,000 pledged was in 1980 when 110,000
were built
- The
average yearly SRS new build number since 1980 has been 28,874 with a high of
36k in 2009
- IF
the SRS pledge is for 90k per year it means that private enterprise needs to
build 210,000 per year to make up the 300k per year pledge.
- The last time that private enterprise built 210,000 properties per year was 1968 when 226,000 were built.
For
private enterprise to move from 160k to 210k per year may well be feasible with
the pledged relaxation of planning rules that Starmer Labour has intimated. Let’s for the sake of argument (and an unholy row over planning laws and NIMBY objections) say this is
possible as the real issue is the staggering increase needed in new social
rented sector properties built.
The social rented sector (SRS) to go to 90,000 per year from its average of c30,000 per year is a tripling of new housing built or developed by its council and/or housing association landlords than they have achieved since 1980!!
Reader, can I suggest you look out of your top floor or office window and you will doubtless see a pig who has just downed a can of Red Bull if you think that a tripling of new build social housing properties is possible and on a sustained basis. Flippancy? Unfortunately not!
A nuance is Matthew Pennycook the shadow Labour housing minister has already said that 90k new SRS properties will NOT be developed in the first year of a new (or should that be New) Labour government. If 50k new SRS builds are delivered in Year 1 it still leaves 400,000 new SRS builds over the following 4 years or 100k per year!
A few years ago (2019) the National Housing Federation (NHF) and the umbrella lobby for housing associations in England said each new SRS build needed a subsidy of£78,000 per property and doubtless this will have increased significantly. Yet 90,000 lots of £78,000 would be £7.02 billion in subsidy per year that the new labour government would need to stump up and in real terms probably £10 billion per year today is a more accurate ballpark figure
Where
is the £10bn per year coming from for the 90,000 per year social rented sector
new build target and pledge? The ultra
conservative (not just in cautious definition) Starmer Labour Party declare
they will not make unfunded pledges at all so the question of where this £10bn
per year subsidy funding to SRS landlords is coming from is a bit of a mystery –
and even more of a mystery when the aim of making 70% of Brits owner occupiers
as Lisa Nandy asserted a few months back when she was shadow housing minister,
which Starmer ratified today on all the news outlets, sees mere social rented
housing as way down the housing priority list for a Starmer Labour government!
I remind again the last Labour government oversaw a 278,000 cut in the English social rented housing capacity and this was despite them giving ‘full’ subsidy levels (the ones the Tories cut by 60% in 2010) and despite reducing the RTB discounts to prevent a loss of social housing by that route.
None of the above is meant to be anti Labour Party or anti Starmer. It is simply a dose of reality to the extreme delusion and hyperbole the SRS ‘sector’ has rushed to all forms of media to proclaim about the Labour Party conference and the very vague aims it pledged.
Actions always speak louder than words and yet we have no idea and have been told absolutely nothing about where a Starmer Labour government will find the £10 billion per year that is needed for council and housing association landlords to triple their output of newly built social housing!
As I stated earlier the likelihood of private enterprise increasing house-building from its 160k per year average to 210k per year is far easier to achieve, and may well be achieved, than the likelihood of SRS landlords tripling their yearly new house-building average … although rest assured that private enterprise will ONLY develop more new properties per year if it is in their best profitable interests else they will continue to sit on the enormous land-banking reserves until government stumps up the tax or other incentives for them to build. Again, this is just the reality we know as that is how the system works and has always worked.
The above figures come from the official house-building data compiled by government for the post-war period and specifically Table 241 (which for whatever reason was discontinued in 2018)
Table
2 – The 2000 to 2020 position (EHA as sourced)
Ive highlighted the 'last Labour Lot' in green and the 278,000 net loss of social housing properties
What was that reader? Facts are pesky? You’re darn right they are!
No comments:
Post a Comment