Rachel Reeves's £39bn housing promise will condemn us all to tents

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a day ago

On paper, £39bn sounds a lot. Until you realise how little you get for that amount of money.
Now, it may have escaped people's attention, but in the Spring Statement, Labour announced a £2bn investment in social and affordable housing that would fund the delivery of 18,000 new homes.
I'll do the maths for you – £2bn for 18,000 homes works out at £111,111.11 each. Using that yardstick, when you tot it all up, £39bn will buy precisely 351,000 new homes.
But there is a proverbial fly in the ointment with these figures – they are spread over 10 years. That means unless that number is inflation adjusted, what you'll be buying with £39bn a decade from now, or even five years, will be considerably less than right now.
The other rhino in the room is immigration. These paltry figures are far short of the 1.5 million homes (by the end of Parliament) Labour promised us a year ago.
Lest we forget, in the last decade alone, the UK has seen a net gain of 2.2 million people. And over the next 10 years, between mid-2022 and mid-2032, the population of the UK is projected to increase by 4.9 million.
I wish I could feel more optimistic about Labour's housing plan, but I'm really struggling.
Not only will the money not be enough to buy an already inadequate number of homes for the existing population, but we're facing a skills crisis. We need tens of thousands of tradesmen to build these homes, and we don't have them.
To make things worse, according to the latest S&P Purchasing Managers' Index monthly survey of leading firms, UK construction firms shed staff at the fastest rate in March since the pandemic. This is against the backdrop of high profile names such as ISG, a major construction firm at the time, folding last year.
Amongst all this bad news, you also have the ongoing farce of the social housing sector which is in a state of what the Housing Ombudsman generously called 'managed decline'.
With a five-fold increase in complaints about substandard living conditions between 2019-20 and 2024-25, I don't see the social sector as the solution.
This doesn't even take into account the continued impact of the Right to Buy scheme and the fact homes are still being sold in England every year despite Labour's plan to ban sales, as has happened in Scotland and Wales.
I hate to be quite so pessimistic about the state of housing in this country, but I can at least share one bright spark with you. Angela Rayner has announced it will no longer be a criminal offence to sleep on a pavement – hurrah!
In preparedness, I've hauled myself a few patio slabs into a wheelbarrow (you can't be too presumptuous about the availability of paving), and I've got myself a stockpile of tents from Argos on order before the panic buying begins.
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