New housing targets – are they realistic?
The UK’s housing shortage is well documented with annual housebuilding rates consistently falling well short of demand. To address this, the labour government re-introduced mandatory housing targets as part of the revised National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) published in December last year, which under the new method for calculating housing need sees the annual target for England increase to 370,000 per year.
The most recent data shows new build completions in England for the 12 months to September 2024 was 221,000, slightly down on the previous year’s figures but more or less in line with average delivery since 2018 if you exclude the period most affected by the pandemic. The number of homes granted planning consent for the same period was around 230,000, so given a proportion of these will never be built, the effective pipeline of new homes is probably already in decline.
The new house building targets are clearly highly ambitious, and frankly unlikely to be achieved in any year to 2030, let alone as an average over the period. However, the ambition is welcome and given that so much political capital has been invested in achieving a step change in delivery by the next general election, we do expect the pace of house building to start accelerating.
Vickery Holman have an experienced Development Consultancy team that works across the South West, providing a comprehensive range of services to help clients at every stage of the development process. Our extensive local market knowledge and in depth understanding of local planning policy is invaluable in assuring land values and development revenues are maximised. We advise a wide range of clients, among them private residential and commercial developers; land owners, registered providers; banks and local authorities, dealing with urban brownfield sites; rural exception sites; greenfield and urban extensions; and single build plots, ensuring developments are financially viable and deliverable.
