How long would it take Labour to deliver 1.5m homes?

New data analysis from Yopa, the full-service estate agents, reveals that if house building continues at the average rate it has achieved over the past ten years, Labour’s pledge to build 1.5m new homes in its first parliamentary term will be impossible to honour, with delivery instead expected to take almost eight years.

Yopa has analysed new home completions data in the UK between 2014-2023* to calculate the average annual delivery number and measure that against Labour’s pledge to build 1.5m new homes in their parliament should they win the general election on 4th July.

The typical parliamentary term for a UK government is five years. If Labour is to fulfil its pledge of building 1.5m new homes within this timeframe, they need to deliver an average of 300,000 homes every year.

But Yopa’s analysis reveals that this number could be very hard to achieve.

The average number of new homes delivered each year since 2014 is 188,194.

There has not been a single year during the past decade where new home completions have come anywhere close to 300,000, with the single best year for delivery being 2022 when 214,594 homes were delivered.

If a Labour government continues to deliver new homes at the ten-year average rate of 188,194, it will take 7.97 years to reach their target of 1.5m.

In such a circumstance, Labour will miss their housing pledge by almost three years.

CEO of Yopa, Verona Frankish, commented:

“Housing has been front and centre of every general election campaign in recent memory and every pledge made to the UK public over at least the past ten years has been missed, often by a country mile.

Such is the repeated failure that whenever an election pledge is made to build a certain number of homes, we can’t help but consider it farcical and empty.

If Labour wins power and wants to break this sad chain of broken promises, they’re going to need to rethink the route to delivery, freeing up appropriate land and eliminating the red tape and procedures that make construction so sluggish.”

Data tables and sources:

• New home delivery data in England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland 2014-2023 sourced from the UK government.
• Full data tables and sources can be viewed online, here.