1.5m New Homes Were Never Going To Be Built

As we pass the two-year mark of this Labour government, it is becoming increasingly clear that their key pledge of building 1.5m new homes in five years is not going to be met.

At the time, many thought that this figure was far too ambitious, with a number of fundamental problems needing to be solved first before this target became realistic. One being the severe lack of skilled workers required actually build these homes.

So where are we at right now?

Lack of pace

Up to now, just 392,400 homes have been built since Labour took power up to June 2026. That leaves 1,107,600 homes to be built in the remaining three years, or 369,200 per year. Frankly, unless there is some miracle in the labour market, we’re not going to get anywhere near those figures.

In all honesty, I don’t believe any of us thought 1.5m new homes in five years could be done. It has been sixty years since the UK was able to build that many. The government has now started to change its language on these figures, slowly coming to the realisation that this lofty target is going to be missed. It will now become a stick to beat them with as we progress further through this parliament.

There are a number of reasons why this target was never going to be met. The cost to build a house has jumped massively due to material costs and additional legislation. The housing market remains constrained due to rising house prices and a generation of people simply unable to afford them. The planning system needs work, but its not broken either. The main drawback has been, and always was, the lack of skilled labour.

Our local Labour MP knocked on our door in 2024 during the election campaign. We had a chat on the doorstep and I asked him about this policy, explaining to him that I was in a connected industry and this would affect me. I explained to him that this target would only be hit if they managed to fix the broken skills market. He waffled his way through some “ums” and “ahhs”, eventually saying that they did not really have a policy on fixing the skills gap and that sort of detail would be worked out by civil servants when they got into power. I said that wasn’t really an answer and that they would fail by some margin to hit 1.5m new homes. He probably regretted knocking on my door.

Missed opportunity

Our industry is affected by the housing market. A housing market with plenty of supply means a mobile one. And when people move house, they spend money on upgrades and renovations. That is money in our pocket. And a housing market with much needed extra supply would have been good for us and other connected sectors.

Sadly, it looks like this is going to be a missed opportunity. I remember at the time some news articles from some corners of the sector getting quite giddy at the idea that we were going to have all these new homes in a relatively short period of time. I understood the enthusiasm but I think some failed to register the problem all installers have suffered for the last ten years, the same way the wider construction sector has, in that there are not enough people to get it done. It really is as simple as that.

We can talk about apprenticeships. But with a skills gap of 200-300k, and an apprenticeship drop-out rate of 40%, we’d need 400-500k new apprenticeship places just for the construction sector alone. That is simply not going to happen.

What we needed to see was the Government get a grip on the skills gap. We needed to see a genuine plan to revitalise a sector which has long been ignored. It has not been forthcoming.

Yes, Andy Burnham has announced a new technical education programme to sit alongside academic studies for kids 14 years and older. But that is a plan still to be fleshed out, and the fruits of that programme will be years down the line. We needed something like this 10-15 years ago. But it is a start, and hopefully it proves successful enough for it to be built on in the years to come.

As a sector, we’re not going to see the boom we hoped we would. Instead, we’ll look at a nother failed promise, and a policy that lacked any sort of meaningful detail and planning.