Cast your mind back to summer 2024. Sir Keir Starmer stood in front of a building site, hard hat in hand, and promised to build 1.5 million new homes in this Parliament. It was the single biggest delivery commitment of his entire programme. Fast forward less than two years and the numbers tell their own story: just 140,860 homes completed in the first year — 47% of the annual target. Only 115,770 homes were even started — 39% of the annual target. The pledge is not in trouble. It is dead.
Numbers Don't Lie
To deliver 1.5 million homes over five years, Labour needed an average of 300,000 a year. We are running at less than half of that. To recover the deficit in years two through five, the country would need to deliver something like 340,000 a year — a level not seen since the immediate post-war housebuilding programme, and that was with direct public construction, not market delivery.
The London picture is even worse. Just 4,170 homes started in the capital last financial year. That is a 72% fall on the previous year and the worst housebuilding performance in London since the Second World War. The Centre for Policy Studies has been blunt: London is now facing its worst housebuilding challenge since 1945. None of this can be blamed on Conservative councils. London has been Labour-run for years and the Mayor of London is a Labour politician.
What Went Wrong
Three things went wrong, and Labour did all of them deliberately. First, they piled cost into housebuilding. The Building Safety Levy, additional carbon levies, and changes to the planning system have added thousands of pounds to the cost of every new home before a single brick is laid. Second, they introduced uncertainty. Every developer in the country is currently sitting on schemes they cannot price because the rules keep changing. Third, they spooked the labour market. The bricklayers, plumbers, sparks and joiners we need to actually build homes have been hammered by IR35, by Employment Rights Act red tape, and by an immigration policy that talks about cuts but in practice keeps adding to the wrong category of arrivals.
Add to that high mortgage rates — driven up by the inflation Labour has not got under control — and you have the perfect environment to kill housebuilding stone dead. Which is exactly what has happened.
The Renters' Rights Act Made It Worse
While Labour was failing on supply, it was also actively shrinking the rental sector through the Renters' Rights Act. Landlords are leaving the market in record numbers. Section 21 evictions have surged in anticipation. Renters are reporting the smallest available stock of properties they have ever seen. The combination of fewer new builds and fewer existing rentals is the worst possible outcome for working people who can't afford a deposit and need somewhere to live.
Young families in my ward are telling me they have given up on the idea of buying. They are not alone. The Building Societies Association has said home ownership rates among the under-35s are now at a multi-decade low. This was meant to be the housing parliament. It has turned into the housing collapse parliament.
What Reform UK Would Do
Reform UK would tear up Labour's planning experiment and start with first principles. We would protect green belt and prioritise brownfield development, especially in towns and cities that already have the infrastructure to absorb growth. We would scrap the Building Safety Levy in its current form and replace it with proportionate, clearly costed obligations, so developers can price schemes again. We would unfreeze the personal allowance to put real spending power back in young workers' pockets, the people who are actually trying to save for deposits.
We would also fix the mortgage market by getting inflation under control, which means getting energy under control, which means undoing the worst of net zero. The whole thing connects. Housing isn't an isolated policy problem — it is what happens when an economy is squeezed from every direction at once.
Labour promised to build a country. Instead they have built nothing. The 1.5 million homes pledge will be remembered as one of the great pledge failures of modern British politics.