Below target - the Government is 120,000 homes short ...

Throughout the years the government has pledged to deliver new homes to make more affordable properties available to the public.

New build- sales optimisation platform, Unlatch, reveals that the latest target in 2021 was missed by -39% which is a shortfall of nearly 12,000 properties.

By analysing data on the number of new home completions across the UK each year and comparing these with the Government’s targets, Unlatch was able to generate these findings.

The delivery of new homes

Back in 2007 Labour aimed to build 240,000 homes a year, yet 215,862 were completed. Unlatch reveal that between 2012 to 2013 Labour completed 133,056 homes, 169,274 were completed in 2015 to 2016 and 178,007 between 2016 to 2017.

Conservatives then raised them an additional 60,000 homes a year and promised to reach the 300,000 annual targets by the middle of 2020.

Despite the complications, the Covid-19 pandemic raised 210,719 new homes were completed across the UK in 2019 to 2020.

More recently, the Government failed to reach its target of 300,000 new homes in 2021. Only 181,810 new homes were completed across the UK which is 40% below target and a shortfall of 118,190 new homes.

Lee Martin, head of UK for Unlatch says: “The complications posed by the recent pandemic will no doubt provide the Government with a convenient excuse to mask yet another year of failure when it comes to the delivery of new homes.”

“But the reality is that this failure is not a recent occurrence, and both the Labour and Conservative parties have failed to seriously honour their responsibility to build more homes for going on 15 years now.”

“This is no doubt due to their archaic, lethargic approach to housebuilding and a failure to adopt the evolving technologies and practices that are helping many housebuilders to streamline their internal process and deliver more homes, without compromising on quality or revenue.”

“The planning system has a huge part to play, as this seems to be the biggest (but not the only)‘road block’. The current Government has diagnosed the planning system as central to the failure to build enough homes, particularly where housing need is at its most severe. There’s a continued focus on supporting private sector delivery, however this is surely down to them to solve with many of the largest national housebuilders willing to give feedback, yet currently the revamp is still paused."

“Unlatch is helping these developers create a more sustainable and accelerated sales approach through their unique PropTech software. Saving their clients hours in laborious tasks on a weekly basis, adding value to their sales teams, and bringing down the average exchange timescale to 25 days from point of reservation rather than when legal packs are received when using the Unlatch platform.”