Keir Starmer’s promise that Labour will build 300,000 homes in each of the next five years has been met with some scepticism. The last time the United Kingdom managed to build more than that number of homes in the course of a single year was half a lifetime ago, in 1977. In 2023, the number was less than 200,000.
Starmer suggests that he will reprise the achievements of Clement Attlee’s postwar government and its work to build the welfare state: new schools, new hospitals, new towns and, above all, new houses. The problem is that the administrative infrastructure necessary to do all this no longer exists. Attlee and his Conservative successors, who were just as keen to build more council houses in the 1950s and 1960s, could rely on dedicated and talented local authority surveyors, solicitors and architects who knew how to get things done and who took the idea of public service seriously. They were done away with in the 1980s by Margaret Thatcher, who excoriated their achievements as a failed utopia. Even if there are new pockets of competence—such as Sadiq Khan’s London, which has built twice as much social housing in the past year as all other cities in England and Wales combined—local expertise cannot be rebuilt all at once.
Angela Rayner, who is charged with delivering Labour’s housing programme, is relying on the market to do most of the job. She wants private-sector housebuilders to develop new large-scale developments in which 40 per cent of homes will be affordable. Rachel Reeves’s initial budget in October put an extra £500m into subsidies for affordable housing, bringing Rayner’s total Treasury allocation for 2024 to 2025 to £5bn.