The forthcoming long-term housing strategy is a huge opportunity for the government to set the agenda for the next five years or more.
The Starmer government is not the first to have bold plans on housing and, as our recent report examined, successive governments have missed their housebuilding targets. Setting a robust strategy will be key to avoiding the same fate.
The new housing strategy should define success and set a clear direction
Beyond general notions of building more homes and improving affordability, few governments over the past two decades have specified what outcomes they want from their housebuilding programmes and why – including their position on critical policy questions such as where they want new homes to go nationally, and roughly what tenure mix they want to end up with.
Without this clarity, reform programmes have lacked drive, direction, clear success metrics (beyond housing targets) and – as a result – credibility. This has often left the housebuilding industry with no clear or long-term trajectory to confidently invest in, instead being buffeted by constant policy churn, made worse by inconsistent leadership. In recent decades housing policy has rarely featured in prime ministers’ top priorities, while housing ministershave been notoriously short-tenured: the last 10 spent fewer than nine months in post.
The government’s upcoming strategy is, then, an opportunity to go beyond this summer’s broad manifesto promises and nail down what success looks like for its housebuilding programme. To inspire confidence, the strategy should set clear objectives, including a 10-year vision for what housing outcomes the government wants to deliver.
These objectives need to be realistic. We recommend that the government publishes analysis setting out – all things being equal – how it expects its policy programme to affect key outcomes such as housing availability and affordability, compared with a counterfactual where housebuilding rates are lower and the tenure mix stays the same.
The strategy should offer a roadmap for reconciling policy objectives
Successive governments, of all stripes, have failed to reconcile their housebuilding objectives with other important policy objectives that affect development, like building standards and environmental regulations. These have often undermined each other where, for example, regulations conflict or remain unclear, increase building costs at short notice or create bottlenecks in overstretched planning authorities.
The government must engage honestly with these trade-offs and set out how it plans to take forward its commitments to housebuilding, the environment and building standards in a coherent way. To help, it could commission an environmental regulatory body (such as the Office for Environmental Protection or the Environment Agency) and housing delivery experts (such as Homes England, industry stakeholders and/or regulation experts like the Future Homes Hub) to conduct a joint urgent review into how to combine higher building rates with better environmental outcomes.
The strategy should set out a credible path to delivery
The government has committed to delivering 1.5 million new homes in the next five years, requiring a rate of building not seen since the 1960s. It has been bold elsewhere too, stating that it wants new homes to come with the infrastructure that local areas need, and promising the “biggest increase in social and affordable housebuilding in a generation”. Both will require increased investment, whether from government, the private sector or from capturing land values.
The government has taken important first steps to setting a better housebuilding record than its predecessors. It has implemented a new National Planning Policy Framework designed to get enough homes through Britain’s planning system, published proposals to reform planning committees to speed up decision making, and increased planning fees to improve planning departments’ capacity and performance. It has also upped investment in the Affordable Homes Programme and committed to reforming Right to Buy – signals that the government is serious about expanding social housing.
But delivery remains daunting. The housing market is in a downturn. Developers are facing a toxic combination of high interest rates (preventing first-time buyers entering the market), materials and labour shortages, and new regulations – from post-Grenfell fire safety regulations to Biodiversity Net Gain and the 2025 Future Homes Standard. All this adds to building costs.
Likewise, social housing providers are struggling with uncertain rent settlements, difficulties getting private finance in a high interest-rate environment, burgeoning maintenance bills and the costs of new regulations. All eyes are on the government’s long-term rent settlement consultation and the June 2025 multi-year spending review, where the government will set out its long-term investment plans in a tight fiscal context.
The government needs to navigate these challenges to avoid them becoming major blockers. We recommend that its long-term strategy should include a five-year delivery plan, setting out what it expects to deliver in this parliament and how.
The government must prepare to course-correct when needed
No matter how good the government’s ‘Plan A’ is, several factors could throw its housebuilding programme off course, or indeed offer opportunities to progress it faster or more cheaply. Housebuilders – and housing ministers and their teams – will be watching the UK’s future growth projections and interest rates closely.
Recognising this volatility, we recommend that the government’s long-term housing strategy includes plans to monitor and evaluate progress against its objectives. It could, for example, commit to producing regular stocktakes that assess progress, identify current and emerging delivery risks and opportunities, and prompt the government to course-correct where needed.
The strategy is a chance for Labour to put its bold plans into action
Starmer’s government is not the first to enter office promising bold action on housebuilding. For it to become the first, for some decades, to get it right and deliver a programme that works will require a clear, robust and credible strategy. This is what it should be working to produce.
Read From the ground up: How the government can build more homes for the Institute for Government’s full analysis on how the government can meet its housebuilding targets.
One reply on “Labour’s housing strategy needs to inspire confidence in a daunting context”
No real chance of the government’s 1.5m delivery target being met.
Cannot rely on speculative private model, while new towns, and other large scale urban extensions, green belt developments etc. are unlikely to deliver much until next decade although some could with a concentrated development corporation with sufficient funding.
Ah, funding. Even to approach a position where the government could be confident to approach 300,000 annually on a sustained basis by 2028-29, it would need to provide enough for 120,000 to 140,000 non-speculative affordable dwellings per annum.
It won’t commit to that because it would mean committing the necessary funds to do that …. fiscal rules, the Ironclad Chancellor, and the such like.
Problem with IoG approach, as eloquently laid out by Sophie, is that it assumes government is technocratically rational and altruistic rather than politically and otherwise self interested, which it has to be to a degree.
Generally shades of both to varying extents across all or most governments, but Labour, like all, will want to be re-elected to preserve the requisites of office, as well as to further wider political objectives.
Agree housing is a 10 year or more programme, but that is not yet recognised by Angela and and Matthew, admirable as they have been in their policy drive and activity.