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Report

How the government can build more homes

Why successive governments have found it difficult to deliver on housebuilding pledges.

A housing development in England
How to build more homes is a question sucessive governments have struggled to answer.

Fixing the housing crisis has featured in every recent UK government’s list of top priorities: this report examines why so many have found it difficult to deliver on such ambitions, and how persistent barriers can be overcome.

England has a chronic housing shortage. Like many before it, the newly installed Labour government has promised to tackle this problem, and to "get Britain building". 

It has set an ambitious target to build 1.5 million new homes in five years, through a combination of planning reform, new towns and the “biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation”. Now it faces the task of meeting this target; doing so will require a rate of completing new homes not seen since the 1960s. 

This report examines the history of why successive governments have found it difficult to deliver on housebuilding pledges. It identifies the persistent barriers to progress, and sets out 10 principles that Starmer's government, and future ones, should adopt to underpin a better approach to navigating them. 

Starmer looks back in anger

The failure to fix the housing crisis stretches way back to the 1990s – so why have successive governments failed to build the homes the country needs? Sophie Metcalfe discusses the findings of our report on Inside Briefing.

Listen to the podcast
Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner during her visit to Bloor Homes housing development site in Basingstoke, Hampshire.

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