John Healey MP, Labour’s Shadow Secretary of State for Housing and Planning, commenting on new house-building data for the first quarter of 2016, said:

“These are deeply disappointing house-building figures.

“After six years of failure on housing on all fronts under the Tories, house-building needs to be increasing but these figures show that in recent months the number of homes being built has actually fallen.

“Ultimately what matters to hard-pressed families is how expensive housing costs have become, and this continued failure to build the number of homes the country needs will make the housing pressures people face even worse.

“Ministers aren’t just failing on building the number of homes we need – they’re failing on providing the right types of homes too. Their extreme and short-sighted housing plans are failing young people and families on ordinary incomes by choking off thousands of genuinely affordable homes to rent and buy at a time when they’ve never been needed more.

“After six years of failure, it’s clear this Government has no long-term plan for housing.”

ENDS

Notes to editors

·         The statistics ‘House Building in England: January – March 2016’ were released today by the Department for Communities and Local Government: https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/525629/House_Building_Release_Mar_Qtr_2016.pdf

·         The data show that quarterly housebuilding starts were 3% lower in the first quarter of 2016 than in the previous quarter, and 9% lower than the same quarter a year earlier. Comparing 2014/15 to 2015/16, starts increased by just 1% over the year as a whole. Housing completions are still a third below their peak under Labour.

·         According to independent House of Commons Library research the 2010-2015 Conservative-led government built fewer new homes than any other peacetime government since the 1920s, when David Lloyd George was Prime Minister.

·          The Housing and Planning Bill, currently in Committee Stage in the House of Lords, will mandate that so-called ‘starter homes’ costing up to £450,000 are prioritised over other, more affordable types of housing. Shelter estimates that 180,000 fewer affordable homes to rent and buy will be built as a result of the Housing and Planning Bill: https://england.shelter.org.uk/__data/assets/pdf_file/0010/1225693/HoL_-_2nd_reading_briefing.pdf

·         The Government’s impact assessment for the Housing Bill admits ‘starter homes will not be additional to housing supply’: http://www.parliament.uk/documents/impact-assessments/IA15-010.pdf, p. 33.

·         From 1997-2010 under Labour almost 2 million new homes were built, and a million more households became home-owners.