If house building continues at the average rate it has achieved over the past 10 years, Labour’s pledge to build 1.5 million new homes in its first Parliamentary term will be impossible to honour, with delivery instead taking eight years, analysis from Yopa has revealed.
Yopa analysed new home completions data in the UK between 2014 to 2023 to calculate the average annual delivery number and measure that against Labour’s pledge to build 1.5 million new homes in its Parliament should the party win the General Election on 4th July.
If Labour were to fulfil its pledge of building 1.5 million new homes within the typical Parliamentary term of five years, it would need to deliver an average of 300,000 homes every year.
The average number of new homes delivered each year since 2014 is 188,194.
There has not been a single year during the past decade where new home completions have come anywhere close to 300,000, with the single best year for delivery being 2022 when 214,594 homes were delivered.
If a Labour Government continued to deliver new homes at the 10-year average rate of 188,194, it would take 7.97 years to reach the target of 1.5 million.
Verona Frankish, CEO of Yopa, said: “Housing has been front and centre of every General Election campaign in recent memory and every pledge made to the UK public over at least the past ten years has been missed, often by a country mile.
“Such is the repeated failure that whenever an election pledge is made to build a certain number of homes, we can’t help but consider it farcical and empty.
“If Labour wins power and wants to break this sad chain of broken promises, they’re going to need to rethink the route to delivery, freeing up appropriate land and eliminating the red tape and procedures that make construction so sluggish.”
