The Government has been forced to row back its plans for mandatory house-building targets following a reported backbench rebellion.
It has been claimed that as many as 100 MPs had threatened to rebel should the target of building 300,000 homes a year in England be mandatory.
In response Housing Secretary Michael Gove has been forced to reassure backbenchers that the target will be “advisory” and a starting point for councils.
The Government’s climb down has been greeted with dismay from the property sector with it being branded as both “counterintuitive” and “negligent”.
Iain Crawford, CEO of Alliance, the Real Estate Fund, said: “Another day, another u-turn but this one is particularly serious in that in watering down the country’s likely annual residential construction output, thousands of would-be buyers and renters are going to have less choice of home.
“The result will be even higher house prices as increasing demand from net positive immigration and an ageing population continues to outweigh supply.”
While James Forrester, managing director of Stripe Property Group, added: “This is astonishingly negligent on the part of the Government.
“House building has languished below the required 300,000 annual number since the 1950’s and that’s even with the focus and accountability of local authority facing targets.
“To remove those targets is to allow the UK’s requirement to dangle in the wind and we now have even less chance as a nation of providing adequate dwelling numbers. It’s a dumb move”.
Lee Martin, head of UK for Unlatch, concluded: “Removing accountability for building at local authority level seems somewhat counterintuitive to the problem at hand.
“Just as the country is slowly getting to grips with higher housebuilding volume and recent completions were starting to look meaningful versus need, the Secretary of State jams that momentum into reverse and effectively kills all possibility of reaching the very levels of supply that the Government itself has aimed for but missed for years. It’s hardly progress.”
