Revealed: only half of Angela Rayner’s 1.5 million new homes will go on the market

Significant chunk of Labour’s building blitz will be set aside for social tenants

Only half of the 1.5 million homes Labour has pledged to build will ever have “for sale” signs placed outside them, analysis suggests.
Housing secretary, Angela Rayner, has committed to building the properties in the next five years – but estimates suggest only 50pc of them will be put on the open market. The rest will be earmarked for social tenants and renters.
The figures, produced by estate agency Savills and the National Housing Federation (NHF), are at odds with Labour’s pledge to help more young people on to the housing ladder.
England’s rate of homeownership has been in steady decline, falling from 71pc in 2004 to 65pc in 2021.
Over five years, building 1.5 million homes would equate to 300,000 properties cropping up each year. The same annual target was set by the previous Conservative government and later scrapped after pushback from beleaguered councils.
Currently, around 210,000 homes are being built on average each year. The Home Builders Federation (HBF) has said it expects the Government to miss its target for the first couple of years, and that it will have to build more like 350,000 to 400,000 in the latter years to make up for it.
But if the Government does deliver on its promises, which include planning reform and more affordable homes funding, Savills and the NHF say up to 150,000 homes could be built each year and sold on the open market.
That is equivalent to 750,000 homes over five years, half of Ms Rayner’s 1.5 million target. The other half, they say, would most likely be “build-to-rent” – homes which can only be rented and not bought – as well as council homes and grant-funded affordable homes.
The Government has stuck by its 1.5 million new homes pledge, despite a significant fall in planning consents over the past three years.
Consents have fallen from 325,000 in February 2021 to 232,000 today – that’s nearly 100,000 less. If consents fall, then so do building rates.
Jacqui Daly, a research director at Savills, said the trajectory for housebuilding “looks like it will fall in the short-term”. Her estate agency has also branded the outlook for house building across the UK in 2024 and beyond as “extremely poor”.
Over the past decade, around 20pc of new homes built on average have been affordable according to separate analysis by think tank, Centre for Cities. A further 10pc of homes built annually are now being purpose built for renting.
Projections for future surges in housebuilding rely more heavily on an increase in social and affordable house building than they do on an increase in building for private sale. This is largely because of the absence of schemes such as Help to Buy, which stoke demand.
Neil Jefferson, chief executive of the HBF, said with no homeownership support in the market for the first time since the 1960s, it’s “never been tougher” for first-time buyers to make the step into homeownership.
His organisation is calling for government support – namely a new version of Help to Buy – to help boost demand and increase private sales. Currently, private sales sit at one million a year, and the HBF says they won’t rise meaningfully without any intervention to support first-time buyers.
The Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government said: “We desperately need more homes which is why we have laid out clear plans to fix our broken housing system and deliver 1.5 million houses in the next five years.
“This will include many more homes for private buyers and the biggest affordable house building boost in a generation.”