Following Angela Rayner’s admission the government is unlikely to meet its 1.5 million new homes target within this parliament, X-Press Legal Services operations director Christian Lister has a suggestion for “a more honest prospectus” the government could adopt.
Britain is building a housing policy the way it builds houses: slowly, expensively, and with a planning statement attached. The Secretary of State has confirmed what the brick shortage, the consent pipeline and every housebuilder’s spreadsheet had been muttering for two years. There is only a “slim chance” of 1.5 million homes being delivered this parliament. This is what passes for candour in modern government: discovering the laws of physics after putting them in a manifesto.
The target, we are told, was always a stretch. Quite so. In the same way that “I will run a marathon in under five hours” is a stretch if you have so far completed two park fun runs and a strongly worded press release.
Still, one must admire the consistency. Labour is keeping the target for the same reason people keep gym memberships in January: abandonment would look worse than non-attendance.
The new official position is therefore a model of intellectual flexibility. The 1.5 million homes remain vital. They are also unlikely. The prime minister, meanwhile, wants council houses. He has made this “absolutely, fundamentally clear,” which in Whitehall means it will appear in every interview until the next allocation letter makes it look slightly less fundamental.
He arrived promising the biggest council-house programme since the post-war boom, a phrase that does a lot of work if you do not look up what the post-war boom actually involved. In the golden age, councils built homes in industrial quantities.
In 2026, the historic comeback began with a £10 billion first wave in which most of the “strategic partners” were housing associations, a housebuilder got a large cheque, and councils were invited to feel spiritually central. Campaigners counted the council-direct slice and found something you could hide behind a modest letterbox.
This is not a U-turn. This is delivery at the pace the system can currently bear, which is a polite way of saying the revolution will be phased, partnered and completed by 2039.
None of this is entirely unfair. Houses do not go up in five minutes. Government is right about that. They also do not go up because a national planning policy framework has been rewritten for the third time and given a more confident tone of voice.
Planning reform remains the government’s favourite magic trick: change the rules, announce that nimbys have been defeated, wait two years, discover that viability, skilled labour, interest rates and the price of everything from steel to stair spindles have not read the press release.
Then there are the headwinds. International headwinds. Construction-cost headwinds. Iran-war headwinds.
Headwinds are extremely useful in housing policy because they explain why the target is missed without requiring anyone to drop the target. A government that cancelled the number would look defeated. A government that keeps the number and blames the weather looks majestically statesmanlike. The homes, unfortunately, continue to notice the difference.
The deeper joke is that both halves of the policy can be true at once. Britain does need many more homes. It also needs many more homes that folk can actually occupy without a bidding war, modern method of auction, a housing-benefit claim or a ten-year wait. Labour has discovered that these are not the same project, other parties should take note. A detailed one.
Building 300,000 of anything is hard. Building 300,000 of the right thing, through councils that have spent 40 years being told not to build, with grants that buy fewer social-rent homes the more socially rented they become, is harder still.
So, the government has done the rational thing. It has kept the big number for the brochure and moved the moral emphasis onto council housing, where the photographs are better and the waiting lists are real.
Give them this: they are no longer pretending the arithmetic is a triumph. Starts are up. Some social-rent completions are up. Money is moving, if not always to the institutions named in the speech. That is more than a slogan.
It is just not 1.5 million homes, the post-war council renaissance, or a solution to the fact that the country is still adding dwellings at a rate last considered adequate when the iPhone was a novelty.
The honest prospectus would be shorter:
- We will build more social housing than recently.
- We will loosen planning a bit.
- We will not hit the number on the tin.
- We would like councils to build again, once they remember how.
Please clap for the stretch target; it is doing its best.
Until then, the policy remains beautifully British. Ambitious in the manifesto, modest in the allocations, lyrical about council houses, reliant on housing associations, haunted by costs, and absolutely committed to the target – especially now that the target has been declared unlikely.
If homes were as easy to complete as caveats, the waiting list would have been cleared by lunchtime.
About the author
Christian Lister is operations director at X-Press Legal Services, the largest independent provider of conveyancing data across England and Wales. He was appointed to the government’s digital property market steering group (DPMSG) in 2026, helping to shape the delivery of the home buying and selling roadmap. Christian also serves on the executive committee of the Council of Property Search Organisations (CoPSO).
The views in this article are those of the author and not necessarily those of Today’s Conveyancer.
