The Labour government came to power with one promise that cut through more clearly than any other: we will build the homes Britain needs. Keir Starmer stood in front of cameras and pledged 1.5 million new homes. Rachel Reeves talked about planning reform as if it were the solution to everything. Nearly two years on, the results are in, and they're dismal. Rents are still climbing, supply is still falling, and ordinary British families are being priced out of their own towns.
The Numbers Tell the Story
Rightmove now forecasts that average advertised rents will rise by another 2% over 2026, on top of the steep increases of recent years. The supposed cause is a "chronic shortage" of rental homes. Let that phrase land for a moment. Chronic. That's the word we're now using to describe a housing market that the government promised to fix within a year of taking office.
Between April 2024 and September 2025, around 231,300 net additional homes were delivered in England. The government's own target is roughly 300,000 new homes per year. That's a shortfall of nearly a quarter of a million homes against what Labour said it would deliver. Meanwhile, the number of rental homes available is 33% lower than it was a decade ago. The market is being strangled, and Labour is holding the rope.
The LHA Freeze Betrayal
Perhaps the most cynical element of Labour's housing record is the treatment of Local Housing Allowance. LHA is supposed to be the link between rents and housing benefit. In a healthy system, the two move together. The Conservative government had frozen LHA rates, and Labour said they would fix it. Then they took power and quietly extended the freeze.
The result? As of early 2026, rents are 20% higher on average than when LHA was last properly linked to the market. A family in a two-bedroom property in Gloucester faces a shortfall of £160 a month between their rent and their housing support. That is money that working families, many of whom are in low-paid jobs, simply don't have. Fewer than three in every 100 private rental properties in England are now affordable for someone on housing benefit. Three in a hundred. That's not a market. That's a shutdown.
Why Is This Happening?
Labour supporters blame everyone but themselves. They blame landlords. They blame the previous government. They blame the planning system. They blame global interest rates. Everything except their own policies. But let's look at what Labour has actually done in power. They've piled new regulations onto private landlords through the Renters' Rights Bill. They've signalled that buy-to-let investment is unwelcome. They've raised taxes on employers and small businesses. And every time they do these things, the rental supply shrinks a little further.
When you make it harder and more expensive to be a landlord, fewer people will be landlords. When fewer people are landlords, there are fewer rental homes. When there are fewer rental homes, rents go up. This is not economics for experts. It is basic cause and effect, and the Labour Party refuses to acknowledge it because it conflicts with their ideological hostility to private property.
The Young Are Being Cheated
The people paying the highest price are the young. A generation of British workers in their twenties and thirties are watching the dream of home ownership slip permanently out of reach. They're paying rents that swallow half their take-home pay. They can't save. They can't plan. They can't start families. And then they're told by government ministers that they should be patient because planning reform is coming. It never comes.
I see it in Preston every week. Young couples in proper jobs, nurses and teachers and electricians, who cannot afford anywhere to live. They're doing everything right and the system is failing them. A country that cannot house its own working population is a country in decline.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK's housing policy starts with a basic recognition that the market needs supply and stability, not more regulation. We would reform the planning system properly, not just tinker at the edges. We would stop the endless war on private landlords. We would prioritise housing for British citizens rather than for an ever-growing immigration intake that adds hundreds of thousands of people to the demand side every single year.
Above all, we would be honest with the British people. If you want rents to fall, you need more homes. If you want more homes, you need to build them. And you cannot build your way out of a housing crisis while simultaneously adding a city the size of Birmingham to the population every four years through uncontrolled immigration. Labour knows this. They just don't want to say it out loud. Reform UK will.