Housing secretary Michael Gove has said that the government remains committed to delivering 300,000 new homes per year by the mid-2020s, in accordance with the Conservatives’ 2019 manifesto pledge.
Gove said that the figure would include homes both for rent and for ownership but warned that hitting the target had been made “difficult” by the current economic climate.
Gove said: “We need to be straight with people: the cost of materials has increased because of the problems with global supply chains and also a very tight labour market means that the capacity to build those homes at the rate we want is constrained.”
Gove’s doubling down on the government’s commitment to the target comes after former prime minister Liz Truss had seemingly dismissed it during her short-lived tenure in Downing Street.
While PM, Truss said that she wished to “abolish the top-down Whitehall-inspired Stalinist housing targets” since they were “the wrong way to generate economic growth.”
Gove said of Truss’ comments: “The top-down housing targets that...Liz was referring to are part of a broader and different calculation from the 300,000 in the manifesto. My view is that what we do need is a fair way of allocating housing need that takes account of changes in population.”
Truss’ successor, Rishi Sunak, had also indicated during his leadership campaign that he did not believe in setting arbitrary housing targets either, but this has not dissuaded Gove from reaffirming the government’s commitment to hitting the 300,000 homes goal.
Gove has previously warned that simply hitting the target should not come at the detriment of the quality of homes built, and that any new developments needed to be built in a sustainable way and with the consent of local communities.
Gove said in May that it would be “no kind of success simply to hit a target if the homes built are shoddy, in the wrong place, don't have the infrastructure and are not contributing to beautiful communities”.
Consent has proven a particular hindrance in the government’s bid to hit its target. Former prime minister Boris Johnson faced stiff opposition from some of his own MPs after he sought to increase housing delivery during his premiership, by forcing local authorities to accept housing developments in certain areas.
This in tandem with issues such as a tight labour market and supply chain issues has cast doubt on the government’s ability to hit the target, with housing secretary Robert Jenrick suggesting earlier in the year that the pledge would be missed “by a country mile”.
Image by UK Government - Flickr.com, taken from Wikimedia Commons
