When Labour came to power after last year’s general election, I harboured the faint hope they might actually know what they were doing. That evaporated in record time. On 22 July last year, I wrote a piece dismantling the PM’s headline pledge to build 1.5million homes this Parliament – and predicted it would blow up in his face.
As anyone with half a brain could see (even me!), the numbers simply didn’t add up. Starmer handed deputy PM Angela Rayner the job of making it happen. Predictably, the whole thing has flopped.
A year on, the results are in. And I was right. That target will never be hit. Rayner won’t even come close.
I didn’t need a crystal ball. I just read housebuilder reports. Barratt Developments, the UK’s biggest builder, completed just 14,004 homes in the year to June 2024. That was a drop of almost 20% on the previous year.
Persimmon built 10,664 homes in 2024. This year, it will complete 11,500 at most.
Taylor Wimpey delivered 10,593 homes last year. With luck, it may manage 10,800 this year.
These are the UK’s three biggest housebuilders and they’re nowhere near hitting Starmer’s target.
To achieve his goal, Starmer needed a 63% increase in annual housebuilding, from 184,390 in 2024 to 300,000. That’s clearly not going to happen.
The Home Builders Federation says the number of residential planning approvals actually fell by 37% in the first quarter of 2025. That’s a 12-year low.
Every government that’s tried to ramp up housebuilding has failed. Gordon Brown set a 240,000-a-year target in 2007. He managed 142,000.
Boris Johnson promised 300,000 a year and never came close. So what made Starmer and Rayner think they’d magically succeed where everyone else failed?
Answer: they didn’t think. They just boasted.
This isn’t a minor embarrassment. It’s a total economic strategy fail.
Housebuilding was Labour’s only real growth plan. Reeves and Starmer pinned everything on it. The Office for Budget Responsibility projected it would boost GDP by £3.4billion by 2030 – but only if completions jumped to 305,000 a year.
They won’t.
Instead of incentivising builders, Reeves has driven up their costs, by hiking the minimum wage and employer’s national insurance.
Meanwhile, the UK population rose by 706,000 over the last year as immigration surged. Demand is rocketing. Supply is crashing. Labour’s central growth plan is already falling apart, just as I warned.
And here’s the scary bit: it was all they had.