HOUSING NEWS
LOVE them or hate them, you can’t get away from targets. As housing secretary Steve Reed told MPs on the housing committee earlier this month: “When the prime minister asked me to take up this job, he was very clear that my priority was to build 1.5m homes over the lifetime of this parliament.”
It’s hard to find anyone else who believes 1.5m (or 300,000 a year) is possible. New figures show net additions to the housing stock fell 6 percent in 2024/25 to 209,000. In Labour’s first 16 months in office, there were an estimated 276,000 additions, leaving an implausible backlog to be made up by 2029.