There is a number behind every Westminster housing announcement that should make Members of Parliament unable to sleep at night. One hundred and seventy-two thousand children in England now live in temporary accommodation. Bed and breakfasts. Hostels. Single hotel rooms shared with three siblings. That is more than three times the figure when the Coalition took office in 2010, and it is rising.

Labour came into Government promising one and a half million new homes over the parliament. The first year delivered 115,700 starts in England. That is roughly thirty-nine percent of what is required to hit the target. The target is, in any meaningful sense, dead. The Centre for Policy Studies has now described London's housebuilding rate as "the worst since the Second World War". And while ministers brief that 2026 will be "the turnaround year", a generation of British children is being raised in single-room hotels.

Numbers That Should End Careers

In 2010, around 50,000 children in England were in temporary accommodation. Today the figure is over 172,000. London alone started just 4,170 new homes in the most recent reporting year — a 72 percent fall on 2023/24. That is not a slump. That is a structural collapse. The pipeline is broken at every level: Section 106 contributions are not being signed, build-to-rent investors are pulling out, small builders have been wiped out by interest rate rises, and the planning system remains the slowest in Western Europe.

And the children in those single hotel rooms have school exams to take, GCSEs to revise for, and homework to do on their parents' phones because there is no desk and there is no internet. None of this is hypothetical. Every constituency surgery I run brings me another family in the same boat. This is now what childhood in working-class Britain increasingly looks like.

Mass Migration and Housing Supply: The Conversation Westminster Refuses to Have

It is impossible to discuss the housing crisis honestly without discussing the demand side. Net migration to the UK has been running well above 600,000 a year for most of the last five years. That is the equivalent of a city the size of Glasgow added to the housing demand pool every twelve months. The construction industry has not added a Glasgow's worth of supply in any twelve-month period since the Second World War — and certainly is not doing so under the current Government.

Until ministers in both parties accept that arithmetic, every "housing strategy" white paper they publish is fiction. You cannot solve a housing crisis if your immigration policy is adding a major city's worth of demand each year and your planning policy is delivering thirty-nine percent of the supply you said you would deliver. Those are simply not compatible numbers.

The Renters' Rights Act Made the Supply Side Worse

Compounding the supply collapse, Labour's Renters' Rights Act — which has had the entirely predictable effect of driving private landlords out of the market — has reduced the rental stock at the exact moment that demand is rising. Section 21 evictions have surged in the run-up to the Act because landlords are taking the rational decision to sell up before the new rules bite. The same families being evicted from private rentals are the families ending up in council temporary accommodation. The policy was supposed to protect tenants. It is, in the real world, doing the opposite.

What Reform UK Would Do

Reform UK would do four things, and we would do them within the first hundred days. First, restore a points-based, capped immigration system that brings net migration down to a level the housing market can absorb. Second, reform the planning system so that small and medium builders can actually deliver — bringing back the British self-builder and the regional housebuilder rather than relying on a handful of national volume housebuilders. Third, scrap the most damaging elements of the Renters' Rights Act and restore confidence in the private rental sector. Fourth, give councils real powers and real funding to build council homes again — at a scale not seen since the 1970s.

None of this is rocket science. It is a question of will. This Government has chosen to manage decline rather than confront it. Every night that 172,000 number sits at a record high is a night when British children are being failed by a Westminster political class that prefers slogans to delivery. Reform UK exists, fundamentally, to change that.